The Ghost in the Machine
by jandl
Summary: Sequel to The Planets Bend Between Us, set after 3x22 for Fringe.  If any man knows the importance of one man's influence on the universe, and how to bring about existence from nonexistence, it's the Doctor.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: **Rose and TenII belong to Russell T. Davies and the Beeb. Olivia and all the Fringe team (as well as the central plot) belong to Fox and Bad Robot. The title is a phrase coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 to describe an idea by Rene Descartes. The only thing I own are the inadvertent typos.

**A/N: **I didn't want to write this story. I really didn't. Mainly because it's not very original plot line wise (cos, let's face it, this is totally where Abrams, Goldsman, Pinkner, and Wyman are going - that's fairly evident, I think), and I didn't really like the way the idea was handled in s05 of DW. It takes Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle a little too far, I think. But my brain insisted on writing it anyway. However, I hope that by making this TenII and Rose, and not the Eleventh Doctor, this will be a bit more original. Best if one reads The Planets Bend Between Us before this because certain facts of s03 were changed to make this story fit that previous story line.

As you can see, some changes have been made in Fringe's canon, to account for the massive change that happened at the end of 3x22. However, certain vestiges of Peter Bishop's thoughts and influence remain, and I'm sure we'll see that in the show as well. You'll see what I mean when you read the story. ;)

**CHAPTER 1**

The Doctor really hated it when time would decide to re-write itself. Or, to be technical, when some total numps decided to re-write time for his or her self and the rest of the world was forced to live based on that re-working. Once upon a time, it had been the Time Lords who had that power - and it was they and they alone - and it was for good reason that the cosmos worked that way. If one didn't understand the workings of time completely through and through, as the Time Lords foolishly thought that they did, one had the capacity to completely ruin the universe because of one silly decision. The Doctor had made more than a few of those in his 900+ years of time and space travel, and because of that he knew a bad decision when he saw one. And the decision that had re-worked time in this instance appeared to be a whole lineage and ancestry full of bad, with an extra set of relatives in the bad family waiting on a nearby lift in the skyscraper of horrible decisions.

It was always a strange thing for he and Rose to have to work around - these shifts in time. As difficult as it could be for a regular person to understand that one man's life could alter the fate of an entire universe, it was a situation the Doctor had seen one time too many for he to write off the circumstance as unimportant. Especially when said person's existence had been the cause of over a dozen laws being written and had led to a covert war with another universe. Add in to that the fact that said person's existence apparently meant a lot to a woman who had the ability to tear apart the walls between universes and put them back together, as the amazing and brilliant Olivia Dunham apparently could do, and well...the Doctor was of the opinion that this universal re-write was something that should be unwritten pretty quickly.

Certain abilities of his had been taken from him when he sprung from the hand that had once belonged to his fully Time Lord self. He could no longer regenerate, and he could only mentally connect with people who had shown a brain where the mental barrier was already strained, and due to his lack of TARDIS he was now stuck traveling through time unilaterally with the rest of mankind. (That is unless he managed to jiggery pokery himself up a vortex manipulator, but the ensuing nausea made it seem as though it wasn't really worth the effort. Especially when one took the time to consider how often the current time line seemed to require his assistance, especially with the continuing rifts in the universe).

He was now literally only half the alien he had been before (and the other half of himself was taken from a certain fiery tempered red-haired human that he didn't much like to mention by name these days because he seemed to have been dosed with human emotions and when he thought of one Donna Noble he often found himself hit with what he had often heard termed to be "grief" or "angst.") But the part of him that was still Time Lord functioned just the same as always in one particular sense. In addition to the 900+ years of alien knowledge, he also had kept his "spidey sense," as Rose so affectionately called it. The Doctor could still "feel" the small changes in time, just as he always had, and unlike the rest of the humans crawling on the planet's face, he remembered the way things had been before the change. This trait used to make for a somewhat lonely existence, as any of his relationships with a companion could be overwritten suddenly by a stranger's influence on time, but he was lucky now. Rose's relationship with time had changed slightly upon her looking into the Time Vortex all those years before, and so did her relationship with reality. Now, when reality changed, though her memory of things was slightly less clear than his own, she did remember things from before, especially major events. Her memories were flawed, but there nonetheless, which was a real help when he needed an accomplice to help him save the universe (or, in this case, the multiverse).

The Doctor was a big believer in the universe telling its occupants quite clearly what it wanted. Before becoming trapped in what he lovingly still called "Pete's World," this had entailed the TARDIS dropping him somewhere he had not intended to be. Quite often, these events ended with he and his companions running for their lives, and with the life sacrifice of some poor friend they had happened to make along the way, but the Doctor had always been able to see that where he turned up was exactly where he was meant to be. Now, the hints were a lot more subtle and linear and Earth based, but no less evident. Time had been re-written and no matter how much the Doctor tried to ignore the changes and live around them, the change continued to eat at him. Ergo, he was pretty sure the universe felt wronged by the change in some way.

Plus, the universe was making it entirely too easy for he and Rose to have access to what they needed, and that was a lot less subtle than he was used to in recent years. Due to the changes caused by the lack of existence of one Peter Bishop, Olivia Dunham from the other universe had never come to Pete's World and gotten caught by the US Secretary of Defence. She had never sat in solitary for months and met Rose Tyler - hell, Rose and the Doctor had never even traveled to the States because Olivia wasn't leaving miniature rifts all over New York City. And, on a slightly more happy note, the Doctor and Rose had not been punished for their "rogue op" and been locked in solitary confinement for three weeks by Pete Tyler. (The fact that they had any luxury they could ask for during their time in the brig was something they left off of official documentation).

Due to these changes, when Britain was asked to send in informed specialists to do diagnostics on the continually degrading bridge between realities that the United States had somehow managed to covertly put together in the confines of the Statue of Liberty, Pete Tyler saw no reason at all why he shouldn't send in his two best agents - his daughter, Rose Tyler, and the Doctor, her partner and significant other. It had been all the Doctor and Rose could do to not break a rib due to repressed laughter when guards led them through the security checkpoints and into the private laboratory restricted to a mere seven personnel on each side of the rift. When the Secretary, whom the Doctor remembered Olivia had referred to as Walternate, looked at them with no recognition, the Doctor breathed an inward sigh of relief. While this meant that it would take some time to get Olivia on their side, it at least verified that they wouldn't be running for their lives the entire time as they had done before.

The laboratory they entered was fairly nondescript. The walls and ceiling were painted eggshell white, and the floor glistened with wax, the Doctor and Rose's pairs of plimsolls squeaking on the hard surface. There were rows of long lab tables going around the sides, covered with lab equipment that was considered state-of-the-art by the day's standards, but which the Doctor still thought of as primitive. At the end of the row of tables, in a prominent position in the room, was a sight that made the Doctor shudder. Standing on a dais in the front was a large metal construction that he knew Olivia had termed "the Doomsday Device." The Doctor had seen many Doomsdays in his time, most of which he wanted to forget, and he was not really sure the machine he was looking at qualified. While it definitely did destroy, it also had somehow created the room he was standing in - this bridge, which after months of helping to facilitate diplomatic talks between warring dimensions, was starting to break down and cause more problems than it was solving. The Doctor had not been called in to the fix the machine - a machine that had not been mentioned in conversations at all in the months since the re-write had occurred - but rather he had been called in to see if he could come up with a "patch" on the universes. Technically, that would be all too easy - he was pretty sure the Secretary's team of scientists and the other version of Walter had come up with one long ago - but in practicality, it was nearly impossible. The technology simply didn't exist yet, and wouldn't in this galaxy for hundreds of years. The long and short of the problem was that the reality needed Peter Bishop - the Doctor remembered that drawing he had found in the Secretary's office the year before all too clearly - and reality no longer had him, nor realised he had been there in the first place.

Luckily for reality, the Doctor had also disappeared from existence numerous times, and he had always found a way back. He had just needed a little help from someone who cared enough about him to find a way. And thankfully, the Doctor knew exactly who would care enough about Peter Bishop to make sure he came back, assuming the Doctor could make her trust him enough to believe him and be willing to help.

The Doctor stared at the imposing figure at the end of the room - the black hulk of metal that he could see occupied two places at the same time. The Doctor was hit with the strange urge to giggle and fought the impulse to turn to Rose and make a crack about being in two time zones at the same time. He almost gave into his urge and did so anyway (he knew Rose would find it funny, though she'd roll her eyes to save face that she hadn't thought of it first), but he saw something out of the corner of his eye.

Most would ignore it - the things they see in the corner of their eyes. But not the Doctor. He often overlooked those things right in front of him, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, but he never glanced over mere glimpses from the side. They were, more often than not, the most important things to note. And what the Doctor had seen was something he definitely thought was worth remembrance. For the briefest of seconds, when he wasn't *really* looking, he had seen the figure of a man, his arms stretched out and locked inside the restraints of the machine, his head thrown back in a painful grimace. And he didn't seem to really be there, but was instead flickering in and out of focus, like an old film left under the projector for too long. The importance of this image was further solidified when the few others in the lab appeared not to notice.

"Rose, do you see what I see?" the Doctor asked, his arm pointing towards the far end of the room.

Rose gave a brief glance before turning to the Doctor with raised eyebrows. "Sure, I do. The wall is lovely, Doctor," she answered, patting the top of his arm with a firm hand in the spirit of a person humouring a friend.

"No, no, no, no, no," the Doctor muttered, circling her by stepping in front of her and then running around behind her, putting one arm over her shoulder and once again gesturing towards what his companion had previously described as the wall. "Look very closely, straight ahead of you. And concentrate, Rose. Concentrate hard. There's something in this room that doesn't belong."

The Doctor watched as Rose began to see what he had seen after a few mere seconds. He knew the second her mind re-asserted itself to its previous set on information about "the machine." Her eyes, always a deep honey brown, gained gold flecks towards the centre near her pupils as the tiny slivers of Bad Wolf which lay continuously dormant in her system allowed her mind to access the general idea of her previous adventure with the machine.

"Do you see it now?" he whispered to her, his eyes flickering towards every side of the room.

"Yeah. It's weird. It's like, when I look for it, I have no problem seeing it, but...if I'm not looking at it, I know it's there - somehow, in the back of my mind anyway - but I don't want to know."

"It's a temporal distortion. Works almost like a cloaking device - it's how the TARDIS operated really - but it's a bit more rudimentary than truly being invisible. As you can see, the scientists and such are giving the area a wide berth. They know it's there on a molecular level - hard-wired into them - but it's like there's a mental block around the information." The Doctor blew out a puff of air, frustrated. The situation just kept getting more and more complicated, and to top it off he was getting a temporal headache. Distortions in time always made him a bit nauseous, and due to the longevity that this distortion had been in place, the physical effects were starting to become more severe. He had shook hands with an ambassador going to the other side, named David Robert Jones, the previous week, and in addition to getting the insane urge to listen to more David Bowie than the human body could handle, the Doctor had also been struck with a sense of illness so strong that he had vomited for two straight hours afterward. He hadn't even been able to listen to David Bowie to lessen the sickness because, sadly, the man had never become a musician in this universe and had instead become a hair stylist, to the Doctor and Rose's neverending amusement.

"You alright?" Rose asked, her voice turning worried as the Doctor felt his face flush.

"I'm always alright," he answered, his trademark I'm-definitely-not-okay-but-you'll-never-hear-me-say-those-words smirk going up one side of his face. He gave Rose a small nudge in her back as he saw a scientist approach them.

The scientist was wearing the familiar white lab coat, a plain button down dress shirt and black slacks beneath it. His hair was a short, slightly messy brown and the name on his labcoat said Brandon. The man gave off a slightly geeky vibe, but the Doctor felt himself ill at ease, regardless of the apparent innocence. There was something slightly malicious in the scientist's smile, and while the Doctor was used to men leering at Rose when they met her, he was disturbed to find that "Brandon's" leer was less undressing-with-the-eyes and more investigate-your-innards-with-a-scalpel. The Doctor unconsciously moved Rose so that she was half-hidden behind him.

"My name is Brandon, and I work for the US Department of Defence. I take it you two are the ambassadors from Britain's Torchwood Agency."

"That's us," Rose announced, putting on her all too familiar guise of being the slightly clueless Vitex heiress who only managed to work for such a prestigious government agency due to nepotism. The Doctor glowed with an inner pride. Not only was she one of the most intelligent and brave women he had ever known - and exceptionally good at hiding it when the situation called for it - but somehow he had managed to get such a woman to fall in love with him. There were random moments, such as when the two of them were trying to look totally ignorant and innocent about how to cross between universes - that he was reminded of just how much he had to lose now that he was half human. "So, are they really different from us? I mean, we in Britain have heard all kind of rumours. That they keep those pepper-pot things that terrorised us two years ago AS PETS. I've even heard that the stars are still out over there."

Rose was really laying it on thick, twisting her fingers nervously and shuffling her feet like a person unsure of what to do with her legs. Despite the Doctor's worry that she might have been over-selling it, the trick apparently worked. The scientist puffed his chest out in importance and seemed quite happy to be well aware of things of which such a well-known heiress was apparently ignorant.

"Oh no, they're all perfectly normal. They're nowhere near us in terms of technological advancement, of course. To be honest, their science seems quite out-dated, and instead of doing the smart thing and having a division devoted to Fringe cases, they merely allocated a part of their FBI. The FBI of course being an agency that, I'm sure you know, we in this universe deemed obsolete decades ago."

The Doctor forcibly bit his tongue and refrained from blurting out just how much knowledge he knew about the true history of this universe. For instance, he knew that the FBI had not been deemed obsolete by any means. The heads of the Bureau had all been killed in a massive outbreak of poisonous natural gases that had sprung from a rift that popped up in downtown Washington, DC and the other branches had been sealed in amber as needed. While working for Fringe Division in Pete's World was indeed an honour - just as much of an honour as serving in Torchwood London - the sight of a Fringe Agent was not something people greeted with happiness in the streets. The only reason the other side had no official Fringe Division was that they had no need of one yet, a situation that the Doctor was more than sure would change over time.

"Anyway," Brandon continued, "I'll need to have your Show-Mes; they don't use them over there. And I'll need any sort of weapon your government has requisitioned for you."

Rose frowned but handed over her gun. The Doctor merely lifted his empty hands and then patted down his suit jacket, showing he carried no weapons with him. The sonic screwdriver was hidden in his dimensionally transcendental pockets, but he saw no reason to draw attention to that. Brandon nodded and the Doctor rolled his eyes as some other scientists patted them both down anyway, despite their cooperation. When Brandon was satisfied that the Doctor and Rose had relinquished all their guns and sharp objects, he placed Rose's gun in a cabinet with extremely thick glass, which was positioned near the door to the room.

"Now, when you switch dimensions, everything should look the way it does now. Although, there may be a different person in the room than me. However, the other side knows you're coming, so they shouldn't try to arrest you. I will warn you though that the people from the other side don't think like us. So far our cooperation has been very diplomatic and peaceful, but that could change at any time. Trust them, but only so far as you have to do. Those are the orders from the Secretary. In his experience, they want to destroy our universe as much as we want to save it. So figure out the problem and get back."

With that, Brandon gave them a nod and left the room, the other scientists filing out behind him. The door clicked shut behind the final glance of white lab coat with an ominous sounding click that reverberated around the too-large and empty room. The Doctor and Rose glanced at each other and both were aware of a strange ringing in their ears and a bright flash of blue light, accompanied by a few microseconds of nausea. The Doctor blinked and when he looked around the room again, it was to see that nothing much had changed. The tables were still in the same layout, there was still a thick glass case near the door (now empty of Rose's gun), the walls were still that annoying eggshell white, and that damned headache causing machine was still barely in focus at the front of the room.

The door opened with a loud click, and the Doctor and Rose hurriedly turned around from their initial sweep of the room. The Doctor had assumed that the first person they saw would be this dimension's version of Brandon (and, he reminded himself, he needed to come up with a name for this universe as well, or he may confuse even himself before the day was over). However, it was not. The person opening the door was a familiar figure. It was a woman with long, straight blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She was wearing a white blouse and dark slacks, her trousers matching the colour around her eyes. As when he and Rose had met her before, there was strong evidence of a lack of sleep and a strong, indomitable will. The green eyes he remembered were burdened beyond her mere 30 something years, and instead resembled his own. The only difference between the woman he had met before and the woman he was seeing now was that her eyes lacked a bit of the life he had seen before - this was a woman who knew nothing but work and misery. Any sort of happiness or friendly camaraderie was something long forgotten.

She walked up to them, the sound of her business-like strut familiar to his ears. "So, you two must be the experts the Other Side was sending. I hope you know more than the last two because we're running out of time. Grab whatever stuff you need; we have work to do," she announced, giving them a brief glance up and down. The expression on her face showed her lack of hope and corresponding lack of faith in their abilities. The Doctor felt half challenged, half indignant, and all insulted. Before the Doctor could formulate a clever retort, she had turned her back and was walking for the door, wordlessly conveying that she expected them to follow post haste. The Doctor and Rose shared a mutual look of annoyance and walked briskly after her. They had only known this version of Olivia Dunham for a few moments, but that was more than enough for them to know that whatever had changed in her life after having Peter Bishop taken from it, had made her a much more hard-hearted woman.

The Doctor tiredly rubbed his eyes as he waited for Rose to pass him at the doorway. Getting Olivia to believe his theory was going to be much trickier and time-consuming than he had hoped.

* * *

><p>Olivia Dunham was not a happy FBI agent. This was not a statement of her overall attitude or regular personality (though she knew some on her team would argue), but rather a confession of current assessment. It was supposed to be her night off, but in typical Broyles fashion, she found herself being called in and having her first good night of sleep in two months ruined. And the only thing she was being asked to do was fill in two scientists on a problem of which she was certain they were already well aware.<p>

For the first four months, the bridge that had mysteriously opened between the two universes had felt like a godsend - a sort of random miracle that she didn't feel comfortable enough to question. Everything had felt so fragile, both in terms of the physicality of the bridge which defied the laws of quantum physics, and in the tenuous relationship between the representatives from the Other Side. Just as they had been making progress, and just as Olivia had begun to somewhat trust her alternate self and the alternate versions of her team, the bridge had started breaking down. At first, both sides had blamed each other for the continuing degradation, but it soon became clear through the cacophony of hurled insults and accusations that both sides were terrified and confused about the turn of events. Whatever unseen power maintained the bridge was starting to wear down, and given that none of them knew of any power sources in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty that could cause such massive amounts of energy, they were all at a loss. Now, they were basically clinging to hope - something Olivia never put much stock in - and putting their faith in people whose credentials Olivia knew nothing about.

In all honesty, she was kept busy just trying to stop the effects of the realistic breakdown from becoming too obvious to the public, a vocation that was becoming more difficult and impossible as time wore on. They were doomed from the start - from the second she first heard of ZFT and John's involvement in subjects way beyond her original knowledge - and it had only gotten worse since Jones and the acknowledgment of Walter and the Cortexiphan trials.

Olivia felt as if she had aged ten years in what was, in actuality, only three. But, she often reasoned to herself, she was an agent "gone to seed" and it was beginning to show. Before working for Fringe Division, she had maintained a virtually flawless case record in the FBI. While some suspects, like the Artist, had taken a few years to catch due to the fact that they would go away for years before resurfacing to get caught, she always got them in the end. Her losses in Fringe Division far outweighed her gains. Five whole blocks in New York City were still out of bounds to the public after a vile toxin was let loose by Jones in his determination to get her to realise her Cortexiphan abilities. While she did eventually show signs that she had been a test subject in the trials, it had become evident a few minutes before the toxin was let loose that she wasn't going to be able to make the lights cut out and her superiors had made her exit the building. And then a year later, she had failed again when a building got pulled from reality because she couldn't identify which building it would be. Most recently, a whole apartment complex had disappeared from reality as well. All those lives, gone forever, simply because she couldn't work some "ability" that Walter and another crazy man had insisted she had. And that was to say nothing of her personal failures, which had been going on for much longer - her sister, her mother, Nick, Charlie...John.

If there was one thing that Olivia had learned throughout the last three years, it was that everything had its time and everything died, and it always happened sooner rather than later.

She finally came to the door to the computer labs that held all of Brandon's logistics and diagnostics that he had been able to run, and swiped her Massive Dynamic card through the lock. Immediately, she moved a little to the right and put her chin on the chin guard, waiting for the familiar red light to sweep across her retinas.

"Retinal Confirmation. Agent Dunham, Olivia," droned the computerised voice.

She listened for the familiar hiss of the door being depressurised and held it open for her two "guests." She glanced over them again as they moved into the room, unassuming and perfectly at ease with this new dimension they had never entered before. It gave Olivia a brief pause. She had only entered Walternate's universe a couple of times since the bridge had been built, but she had always stayed as briefly as possible. There was something about the air over there that made her nervous - queasy in the stomach - and a feel of being hunted always seemed to pervade the environment. She wanted to describe it as deja vu, and would have described it to her own version of Walter as such a few years ago, but given that she knew his theory on what deja vu was (a theory that had extreme credence, given her day to day life), she avoided doing so. After all, with his theory that deja vu was caused by alternate versions of herself having done her action before in a different reality, she thought it was quite possible she was merely catching a back draft of such an experience. Before meeting Walter, she would have said that deja vu was a symbol that she was where she was meant to be, and that it probably explained why she rarely felt deja vu, but her previous explanation of events didn't really seem to match up anymore. In any case, she couldn't decide whether the new scientists' lack of awe and trepidation made her more comfortable with them or more wary.

"So, Agent Dunham," announced the male scientist, clapping his hands once with a loud bang that sounded throughout the lab. She almost asked how he knew her name, but then remembered the security system had announced it quite loudly. "Where do we start? We can do this the time consuming way and I can go through all your data and my trusty-though-slightly-less-techno-savvy companion Rose-"

"Oi!" yelled the blonde scientist indignantly. Olivia surmised this was Rose, not that she felt that particular deduction was all that difficult really.

"Well, you are a little less techno savvy. Don't worry. It's not your fault," the pinstriped man said, a smile on his face. The girl - Rose - looked far less amused and merely glowered at him, rolling her eyes and looking at Olivia. Rose raised her eyebrows, and made an expression that said quite plainly "can you believe him?" Olivia was even less amused and found herself wishing they would stay on topic. If they had this little attention at the start of the night, she did not want to imagine what they would be like after a few hours. She briefly entertained the thought of leaving them with Astrid or Walter while she went and did paperwork, but dismissed the notion quickly. Even less work would get done if Walter was with them with no supervision, and Astrid was one of the only agents allowed in the building that Olivia could stand and she didn't want to risk pissing the junior agent off and having Astrid leave Walter with Olivia for longer than five minutes. Olivia had only limited patience for the man, and she knew Astrid was aware of what a punishment it would be for Olivia to be stuck with him and his antics for too long.

"Just do whatever you have to do," Olivia announced, putting a hold on the ensuing playful argument she could instinctively tell was about to arise between Rose and her male friend. "Run diagnostics, put together some weird contraption I can't pronounce, talk with Walter and Brandon and Nina Sharp. I don't care. Just tell us whether or not you can help." She ended her little bout of instructions and frustrations with a tiny huff and it was all she could do not to throw her hands in the air in surrender. She was running on two months of little sleep and endless worry, and her temper in recent days was nonexistent. She was a woman who *wanted* to give up, but couldn't - her personality wouldn't allow for it - but her hope of things getting better dwindled every day. She almost wished the world *would* end so that she would stop worrying about the inevitability of its happening. However, some higher power - she bet it was those Observers that had plagued her life for three years before they mysteriously disappeared - kept putting little bursts of hope in her path. The sunlight in the morning, the few times when she was able to save someone in the last few years, the time she had awoken from a vegetative state when everyone had expected her to die (though that was a bittersweet thing as it had led to Charlie's death, and she was plagued with migraines ever since). All of these things kept her from losing hope completely, though part of her wished her hope would die; believing in something when you have no visible reason to do so was exhausting.

She wanted to dislike the two scientists - it suddenly occurred to her that the man still hadn't introduced himself - but she found herself unable to do so. She didn't trust them and wasn't sure they were even qualified to handle the problem - they looked too young to be experts (though she knew looks were misleading), and they seemed too blase and carefree about the problem - but something in her was trending towards trusting them. She loathed that part of herself for it tended to get her into more trouble than was worth it.

"Right. We'll go about it the quick way then. First, you'll have a seat, Miss Dunham, and then you'll tell Rose and I all about what's been going on the last six months on this side of the rift. And then, when you've told us all the little details and we've deduced what's changed from before, we're going to help you fix it by giving you back what you've lost. I'm the Doctor, by the way." The Doctor, as the man had introduced himself, said all of this very fast and confidently. It was all Olivia could do to keep up. When her brain worked out everything he had said and comprehended it all as best as she could, Olivia did something she hadn't done since before she could remember, and it was really an automatic reaction and more incredulous than anything else...

She laughed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **See previous chapters.

**A/N: **Sorry for the slow update. Life has been really hectic for me the last couple of weeks. Thanks to all who reviewed and recced this. Your support means more than I can say. I hope you enjoy!

**CHAPTER 2**

Rose Tyler decided not to take Olivia Dunham's laughter too personally. For one, it was obvious the woman was in desperate need of a good laugh, and that a large portion of the span of time she had been doing so was due to stress. When it's been building for a while, and is then released, it tends to come off in one long act - sometimes of violence, sometimes in a long sleep of over a full day, and sometimes in a bout of laughter. Also, Rose couldn't really blame Olivia for laughing. The Doctor's plan probably sounded quite preposterous. What good had talking about the past ever done for physically altering the universe, at least from a totally sane, never-having-traveled-across-the-universe-with-the-Doctor standpoint? Probably little to nothing, as close as Rose could figure. Therefore, she forgave Olivia her incredulity. It was a totally natural reaction, especially given that Olivia had no conscious memory of having contact with the Doctor before. Rose only hoped that something unconscious within Olivia's mind would accept what the Doctor had to say, despite Olivia's trend toward skepticism.

Rose took the moments of Olivia's laughter to think about the situation. As far as Rose could tell, she was in an entirely new universe. Upon hearing that she would be traveling to Olivia Dunham's dimension, she had a brief moment of excitement mixed with trepidation. She remembered the brief conversation she had with Olivia upon their initial introduction in Pete's World and that all the major events of Olivia's universe were identical to the major events of Rose's initial universe. Rose had both hoped and been afraid that they were the same. However, after mere seconds of standing in the "bridge" room, she had been able to tell that the universe Olivia was from was quite different from Rose's original home. Something about the air in this universe, though somewhat familiar, felt distinctly off. The fact that the major events were exact in their details meant that Olivia's universe and the universe the Doctor and Rose had initially traveled in were probably side-by-side, and the walls probably as thin as the ones between Olivia's world and Pete's World, but they were not the same. Upon this realisation, Rose had almost kicked herself for hoping. After all, Olivia had been ignorant of the Dalek Invasion and the Army of Ghosts - attacks that had been world-wide in Rose's original home - and she knew Olivia would have been well cognisant of those events. Still, Rose had felt a brief moment of hope, but she had been shocked to find that the disappointment she felt upon having that hope snuffed out was small compared to what she had imagined it would feel.

The room Olivia had led Rose and the Doctor into was filled with large computers and whiteboards covered in equations and complicated theorems that the Doctor would probably claim were completely wrong, but that Rose couldn't even begin to decipher. Not that she would tell him so; no, she would merely nod at what he said and smile as though she had even an inkling about what was coming out of his mouth. And the second his back was turned, she would share a bemused and confused look with the advanced scientists in the room and allow herself the comfort of knowing that at least she was no dumber than the geniuses the Doctor had just outwitted. At least, that was the way these situations usually went, and Rose was pretty certain this time wouldn't be much different. There were some things that were a given in life with the Doctor and feeling generally dimwitted was one of them.

When Olivia started speaking again, Rose forced herself back to the current state of affairs. Apparently two minutes of laughter had not changed Olivia's perspective on the credibility of the Doctor's methods for her voice was just as incredulous as her laughter had been. "How is that going to work? You're gonna be a shrink and I'm going to fill you in on the past, and suddenly everything will be fixed? I've become fairly open minded after seeing some of the things Walter's done over the last three years, but that is a stretch. There is absolutely no scientific basis AT ALL in that idea. I'm not a scientist, and even I can tell you that."

Rose braced herself for an interesting discussion. Both the Doctor and Olivia Dunham - or the Olivia Dunham that Rose remembered from before the change - had strong wills and quick minds, and neither would give up on their agenda very easily. However, Rose knew from experience that no one ever told the Doctor that something was beyond his power. He would make it his own personal mission to prove to the challenger and the universe that he was right, or he would die trying. Rose seriously hoped that the Doctor wouldn't let the situation go that far this time; he didn't have any more regenerations or spare hands lying around to give him extra chances this time.

"First off, don't insult a good shrink. They can usually tell when a person has a problem before the patient does. And trust me, when you finally believe me - which you will, by the way - you'll really see the truth in that statement. And second, don't underestimate my intelligence. You'll never find a smarter man than me anywhere in the universe, and that's not opinion or ego, it's merely fact. If I ask you a question, it's because the answer is important. Your universe is falling apart around you second by precious second, and so is Pete's World. This "bridge" that's been created - and to be honest, it's closer to being a paddle boat that's sprung a leak and is sinking fast while all of your so called scientists run around bailing out water with pails - was put together by a shoddy engineer and there's heavy traffic trying to cross it. Now, you can answer my questions, silly as they may seem to you, and trust that there's no one more equipped to handle this problem than me, or we can all sit here and wait until the universe crumbles around us. Trust me or not, I'm all you've got. When it comes to the universe, there's no greater source of intelligence than me."

When the Doctor was finished, his dark brown eyes were blazing. Rose felt her unease with the situation rise, and gooseflesh crawled up her arm. The Doctor didn't usually get so impassioned or indignant with a skeptical acquaintance quite so quickly. Rose suddenly felt the situation must be more dire than she had previously assumed based on the Doctor's intense reaction, especially considering he was showing his temper to a woman that he considered a friend and held in such high esteem. The Doctor's belligerence had quite the effect on Agent Dunham, if appearances were anything to go by. The agent had raised her head a little higher and stiffened her jaw slightly, like a girl who had been scolded by the teacher before the entire class and did not quite appreciate it. But there was also an acquiescence there - an unspoken promise to listen and try to keep any sort of disbelieving sounds to a minimum.

"Alright," the blonde agent said, her voice curt and to the point. "I'll answer your questions. But only if you really think it will help."

Olivia grabbed a swivel chair from one of the nearby tables and swung it around to a lab table, sitting behind it, her back ramrod straight and stiff and her hands folded in a business like manner over the faux-marble tabletop. She sat so stiffly and without expression that if Rose had not known better, she would have assumed the woman to be a painted statue. Rose remembered a semblance of that stiffness from meeting Olivia in Pete's World, but the current form of it seemed extreme, as though Olivia had forgotten entirely what it meant to relax.

The Doctor swung himself onto the table that lay adjacent to the one Olivia was sitting behind and sat Indian style on the tabletop, loosening his tie as he did so. Rose hopped up beside him and dangled her legs off the side. The Doctor gave Olivia a sincere "Thank you," and leaned back, resting his weight on his hands for a few moments before springing forward again and resting the tips of his fingers together and resting his chin on them, like a wizened old professor using the Socratic Method on an overly-intelligent pupil.

"Now, let's start with the most obvious change - "

"Change, what change?" Olivia asked, giving Rose a look of confusion. Rose felt a brief second of guilt as she schooled her face into an image of nonchalance and gave Olivia a stony expression. After all, despite Olivia's hard exterior, she had been someone Rose considered a friend, and it was hardly Olivia's fault that she had no memory of the meeting. But they were running on little time, as evidenced by the Doctor's all-business attitude (something he only did when he was greatly worried), and so Rose felt that if the Doctor didn't deem it fit to answer Olivia's question, Olivia was probably safer not asking it.

" - and I'll ask you if you know anything about how Walternate gained power on the other side."

Rose glanced at the Doctor, for she was well aware that it was the kind of question he already knew the answer to. The Doctor merely give her a small glance from the side and a tiny quirk of a smile, and Rose decided to act as though she were as clued into the Doctor's plan as the Doctor was, not that the Doctor ever really had a plan. Well, unless blow something up and run away as though hell were after you counted as a plan. In any case, the Doctor apparently had a reason for asking this question, and Rose wasn't about to be the one to give the game away.

"I don't know specifics," Olivia answered, lifting her hands slightly as she spoke. Rose found herself clinging to this one factor of Olivia Dunham for it was the one thing so far that apparently had not changed at all. Olivia still spoke with her hands. "According to my alternate and her team, and what little snippets of their universe's past that they've been willing to share, Walter was a high level scientist working for a company much like Massive Dynamic until the mid-80s. That was when the tears in the universes started to appear. At first, they didn't know what it meant - they were just random anomalies, and they usually led to the deaths of maybe a dozen civilians at the most. But they escalated quickly, and in 1986, Walternate's wife Elisabeth was killed in one of the Fringe incidents that occurred. She was walking across the Harvard Campus to meet with your Walter when a car from our side crossed into your universe and ran her down. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But apparently your version of Walter is just as myopic and obsessive as mine, and he couldn't let go of this idea - wanting to know where this car had come from. When small objects from our side started popping up in your universe, he came to the conclusion that the theory of multiple universes was correct and he started to find ways to cross over.

"As for his rise to the position of Secretary of Defence, I know much less. If you were to ask the version of myself from your world, she would probably say that he united the people under a common goal and was given the position by the President because he was able to instill in the people a modicum of the feeling of safety as well as give the feeling that he could sympathise with them, as he too had lost someone he loved due to my universe's interference. If you asked anyone from my universe, we would tell you he preyed on their emotions and their grief and basically pulled a Machiavelli and wormed his way into the position. But my superiors would probably just tell you I'm biased."

"You don't trust the Secretary do you?" the Doctor asked, his voice sounding almost contemptuously amused.

"Of course not. Lose as much to him as I have, and you wouldn't trust him either."

"Oh believe me, we don't," Rose answered, taking the opportunity to finally speak up. "If anything, our employers are even more wary of him than you are."

"Why?" asked Olivia, removing her arms from the table and crossing them across her chest, leaning back slightly to a more relaxed position in her swivel chair. Rose felt something inside of her that had been unknowingly tense the whole time ease itself a bit. Olivia was still wary, that was evident from the closed posture, but she was becoming a bit more comfortable. Apparently, anyone who questioned the Secretary was a bit more trustworthy in her book.

"Because he holds too much power," Rose answered blatantly. "Even in Britain, people subscribe to his way of viewing the world. In our universe, we've had problems not only with your universe, but with others - the walls for us are even thinner than the ones for you. We at Torchwood know that it isn't solely your universe's fault - the holes were already there, and there are outside forces that no one outside of Torchwood knows about that are contributing factors - but Dr Bishop's views are quite popular among those not in the loop. He thinks that the war he declared on your universe all those years ago was just and right, and he still hasn't backed down from that, even through all the peace talks. That sort of unapologetic allegiance to an idea is a dangerous thing. It can't see anything else, and that worries us at Torchwood. In Britain, we saw the worst of what allegiance to the ideas of one man can do to a people."

The Doctor and Rose were both silent for a moment as they remembered all those who had been "upgraded" to Cybermen or "deleted" by the Cybermen due to Dr Lumic's fear of death. One man's determination to stay alive and defeat death had led not only to his own death, but to the deaths of hundreds of others in London alone, to say nothing of those who had been cyberised in continental Europe. The moment soon passed and the Doctor spoke again.

"Now tell me about the events six months ago. What led to this so-called bridge?"

"It was strange. For days previously, the cracks between universes had been getting worse. Crazy lightning that caused cars to explode and bridges to split in half, vortexes were opening, buildings from both dimensions were mixing together. It was chaos. And then, at 6:02 am, we got a call that a room in the Statue of Liberty was 'flickering' - that was the word they used. Everyone who entered the room would see flashes of a similar room with different people in it. Well, we quickly vacated the area, terrified that it was another incident of two buildings in the same space merging together. And they did merge, but it was weird because for the first time ever in a merge, everyone was safe. The two dimensions mixed perfectly in that *one* spot. At first, everything was perfect and everyone could meet in that one room and travel back and forth between the two dimensions with no problems. But, now it's like a short-circuited battery. Only one dimension can be in the room at a time. You can flick a switch and cross over, but the two dimensions aren't in the same room anymore, but you are standing in the doorway with one foot in and one foot out."

"That's a pretty good analogy of the problem actually," said the Doctor, one eyebrow quirked to show that he was impressed.

"Yeah, that's how Brandon explained it to me after Walter said in it a much more scientific way that made no sense."

"So," the Doctor said, taking a deep breath, "the real problem is that you have either a short circuited battery or the batteries are going flat and you need to get them charged, am I right?"

Olivia was silent a moment, bobbing her head side to side a bit, before pursing her lips and nodding. "That sounds a bit like the description I would give it, yeah."

"Hm. Well, you see the problem with that description is that it's not the right one at all."

Even Rose found herself a bit confused. It sounded quite accurate to her, given the problem Olivia had been describing. Rose hadn't been quite sure how the Doctor planned to fix said problem, given that she wasn't sure how you could "re-charge" a battery if said battery was a person, but the problem in and of itself had seemed fairly straight forward. But, as usual, this encounter with the Doctor was apparently not what it seemed.

"So, what is the problem then?" Rose asked, voicing the question she was fairly sure was on the tip of Agent Dunham's tongue.

"The problem is," the Doctor announced, drawing out the "-ess" sound in apparent relish, "that you're running your computer on the wrong operating system."

"I believe I speak for both Olivia and myself when I say, 'what?'"

"To use an analogy that would make a completely inexplicable idea explicable, you are trying to operate a programme - a very advanced, multi-algorithmic, complexly coded programme - on a basic Windows 95 operating system. The programme and its assets are too complex of an idea for your basic PC."

"I'm afraid you lost me at all the complex computer stuff," Olivia said, giving Rose an alarmed look, complete with raised eyebrows. Rose merely shrugged, as lost as she. For the first time, Olivia seemed completely like the Agent Dunham Rose remembered meeting the year previously. Totally out of her depth and lost in the Doctor's rambling, but eager to grasp the concept and use what she had learned to put to rights what was wrong.

"Ok, to put it as simply as possible. The problem is that what you think is a battery isn't a battery, therefore the problem isn't the power source. The problem is that the bridge and the universes aren't compatible. They never should have been in the first place. This bridge was never supposed to be here, and the two universes NEED to be kept separate. The walls between realities haven't been able to heal because both sides - due to both Walter's interference and the Secretary's - keep crossing over. The travel between dimensions needs to stop, and both realities will eventually reach some semblance of normalcy. It'll take longer for our world because there's been more trouble than simply a war between this universe and our own, but cosmos willing, it will happen eventually."

"So, how do we get rid of the bridge?" Olivia asked, asking the obvious and yet most pertinent question.

"Well, that's where you come in Miss Dunham. And I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. But you're going to have to trust me, and it will be difficult for you, but you have to because if you don't, eventually both universes *will* die."

A brief glimpse of fear and worry crossed Olivia's face before it was hidden behind the familiar look of steely resolve that Rose was most familiar with seeing on the agent's face. She went from confused and slightly wary woman to war-weary, determined soldier in microseconds. Rose couldn't help but slightly admire that.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to go through you memories, and find who you lost."

Rose fought the urge to put a hand over her eyes and groan. She had urged the Doctor before they began this mission to make sure to ease Olivia into the idea of re-written time lines gradually (she knew from experience that it could take a while to process), but as usual the Doctor had steamrollered his way in with direct statements. She really hoped Olivia could trust them as quickly this time as she had done before, because otherwise they were now seriously screwed.

* * *

><p>Olivia was not positive when her brain had gotten off the main road of the conversation that she, Rose, and the Doctor were having, but it must have been a few exit ramps before where ever the Doctor was, because she was totally lost. Olivia did not consider herself the smartest person in the world when it came to science - she was no Brandon, Walter, William, or even Astrid - but she did know the basics, and she was pretty sure the Doctor was running from the world of science into the realm of science fiction.<p>

"I'm sorry. You lost me. You need me to remember someone I've met before? You're going to have to give me some clues because I've met a lot of people since coming to work for the Fringe Division, and there's 28 years worth of memories from before that."

"No, no, no, no. I need you to remember someone specific, but it'll be hard because you've never met him."

Olivia was pretty sure that the Doctor was making the kind of sense that just...well, it wasn't sense at all if she wanted to be frank. It sounded like the sort of thing Walter would say, and she had the sudden urge to call him in and ask for his assistance, but resisted. After all, the Doctor would probably only start speaking even more complicated analogies and theorems with another genius in the room. Olivia looked to Rose, hoping the younger blonde woman might possibly give some sort of expression that would convey even the most minute of information as to what the hell the Doctor was talking about.

Rose thankfully took the hint.

"Doctor, maybe you should start by explaining about time lines."

The Doctor gaped at Rose slightly open-mouthed for a moment as though baffled at her confusion. Rose nodded in Olivia's general direction and it was only when the Doctor glanced in Olivia's direction and saw her confused expression that he apparently realised why it was that Rose made the suggestion. "Oh yes. Quite right. Well, most people see time as linear - one second after another, cause and effect, minute by minute, hour by hour. But it's not like that at all. It's more a great big ball of wibbly -"

"Wait, is this the idea of time is part of a fourth dimension and it can fold itself backwards and re-write things?" Olivia asked, cutting in.

The Doctor looked faintly put out, and Olivia fought back a burst of pride that she apparently knew at least a little something that the Doctor apparently considered beyond general knowledge.

"Yes. That," the Doctor said, slightly begrudgingly, "Well, even if you normally don't believe it, assume for a moment that the theory is truth." Olivia already believed in the idea of time travel, having seen small vestiges of it before - enough to suggest that the idea had *some* credence to it anyway, but said nothing. "Sometimes, these re-writes are events. Other times, they're people. Now, some re-writes are fine - they can be done and the universe carries on much like normal with only a few differences. But some events and some people are fixed. They have to live and they have to die at a certain time, and any forces messing with those events can end the entire universe. Now, whatever or whomever caused the re-write this time did it well enough that the universes have held up for much longer than they usually would. But not well enough, as you can see. Now, I'm lucky in that I'm, shall you say, one of a kind and Rose is 'smarter than your average bear' (to quote a popular American cartoon), and I remember the way it was before. I remember *you* from before."

"That's impossible. You're from Pete's World. I was never there until four months ago and I never left the Statue of Liberty."

"That's true. You haven't been there. Not anymore. But once upon a time, you spent quite a period of time there. It's also probably why you're so innately distrustful of Walternate. He didn't exactly give you five star accommodations while you were there, to be quite honest. And while you were there, you met me and you met Rose. And we got you home."

"I don't believe that. I *can't* believe that. I mean, I have a photographic memory. I remember everything, and I don't remember that at all."

"And yet, a part of you does believe me. Just like a part of you believes me when I tell you that you lost something irreplaceable, and that the someone you've forgotten is the person that this entire reality is dependent upon."

It was all Olivia could do to keep staring into the Doctor's eyes and not glance off to the side, for he was completely right.

"Okay, let's say you're right and that I did once know someone that I've apparently now never met. How do we make me remember someone that I've never had contact with?"

"That's the great thing about energy," the Doctor said, bounding down off the table and walking down to the whiteboards, where he uncapped a marker and started writing equations. Olivia watched as Rose walked up next to him, looking at his scribblings with interest. Olivia wasn't sure if he was really writing science or just wanted to keep his hands busy while he thought, for she was pretty certain she saw him draw a telephone box at one point in the equation as though it was a variable. "Energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed. Your friend whom you lost, is technically still existent even though reality can't recognise him. He once existed, therefore he has always existed and always will exist. Whatever took him out of the universe could not do it completely, but it could dim his electrical signal enough that none who knew him before would recognise the signal. Not without me anyway."

The Doctor recapped the marker, apparently finished with his maths. Olivia looked at the finished product and felt even more confused. Inside the already complex algorithm were randomly drawn circles and dots that, though beautiful, had no real apparent meaning as far as Olivia could tell. She doubted even Walter would be able to gain much knowledge from it.

"Your friend is sending out signals; I know because they've been kicking in my head and giving me a headache ever since I stepped foot on that "bridge." But the problem is that I'm not outfitted to communicate with him - he's not on my wavelength, I guess you could say. You on the other hand, Agent Dunham, if I can get the right equipment, would find it quite easy to have a conversation with him, if I amplify the electrical signal."

Olivia released a heavy sigh. She had a pretty good idea where this was going, and she didn't like it one bit.

"What kind of equipment?"

"A sensory deprivation tank that could be wheeled into the "bridge" room would be good for starters."

Olivia closed her eyes and resisted the urge to thunk her head on the tabletop. She hated that tank, and no good ever really came from getting in it. But, the universe needed her to talk to this guy, and she supposed that a few minutes of discomfiture was a lot less pain than she had suffered through in previous cases.

"I think I know where I can find one."

* * *

><p>An hour later, she was standing in the "bridge" room with Walter, Astrid, Broyles, and the two scientists from the other side. The man who called himself the Doctor was busy putting wires and electrical equipment together with Walter on one side of the room (and causing quite a ruckus with their banter while doing it), while Astrid and Rose were double checking the measurements on the drugs that would have to be put in Olivia's system. Olivia meanwhile tried not to think about the last time she had gone into that tank to have a conversation with a guy on another plane. He had ended up stuck in her head for months after he had died, and for a while she had been unable to tell her own memories from those of her former boyfriend's. It had been somewhat frightening, to say the least. And then when she had gone into hypnosis to find Nick Lane, a boy from her childhood whose dreams she had been sharing, she had panicked. She had seen seen him kill a poor, defenceless stripper with his own misery and she had panicked and gone into a temporary catatonic state. When she awoke a couple of days later, Nick had committed suicide, his wild hyper-emotive powers taking six other people off the top of a multi-storeyed building with him. Olivia was wary of letting other people into her head, and she was only doing so now because she felt she had no choice. The end of the world trumped her personal discomfort with having other individuals wander through her mind. Plus, if what the Doctor said was true, then this guy she had forgotten was in her head anyway. She may as well make some use of him.<p>

Broyles had asked her if she was positive about what she was about to do. She had answered in the affirmative, despite the fact that she was never really positive about anything anymore. It was either do the Doctor's suggestion or do nothing, and nothing was never an option where Olivia Dunham was concerned.

Olivia leaned on Astrid's shoulder as the Doctor put the neural receiver into the base of her skull, just as she had done three years before when she had first climbed into the tank. The one in the "bridge" room was not the same one that was placed in Walter's lab in the Kresge Building at Harvard (as that one was immobile), but one wouldn't really be able to tell so from the somewhat rusted doors. The only difference was that this tank had wheels. The Doctor and Rose kept their hands on the tank to keep it from moving as Olivia stepped in, using Astrid's arm for support as she did. Olivia gave a brief shiver as she submerged herself in the strangely green coloured water, and the doors slowly closed, leaving her in darkness.

"Now, Olivia. Concentrate on my voice," she heard the Doctor say from beyond the confines of the tank. "When I count to three, you're going to open your eyes up in the place you feel safest."

Olivia closed her eyes and relaxed as best as she could, listening to the sounds of her deep breathing as they echoed through the small metallic confines. She felt the LSD-riddled drugs course through her system, ignoring everything else but her breathing. She ignored the weird humming sound that permeated the "bridge" room whenever she was in it - a sound no one else seemed to hear and that she attributed to her Cortexiphan abilities, as when she crossed dimensions she tended to have super-sonic hearing for days afterward - and she ignored the whispers of Astrid and Walter that she could hear coming through the tiny crack between the doors.

She didn't hear the count of one or two, but she heard the three, and in a move that would have made Pavlov proud, opened her eyes the second the final "-e" sound of the word "three" was done. When she opened them, she found herself in her apartment. It looked just as it always had. There was an open bottle of fine scotch on the centre of the living room table, and a small fire was going in the fire place before her couch. She found herself standing at the door. It was when she turned to the right that she first found something odd. Resting next to the door was her sister's wheelchair. When Olivia was nine and her sister Rachel had been four, her step-father had come home drunk and started beating their mother. Olivia had stood by in fear and merely watched as her mother's nose had been broken, and then her step-father had calmly walked out of the house and on his way out of the door, her step-father had grabbed Rachel. Olivia had chased after him, but he had shoved her back inside the house and shut the door. By the time Olivia had raced through the front yard, her step-father had sped away, her sister in tow. Olivia had expected them to come back, but hour after hour went by and he never came. When the police came to the door hours later, Olivia had been terrified and her mother had nearly fainted. Her drunk step-father had flipped the car. He was dead (not that Olivia was going to be crying over that one), but Rachel had survived. But she had been paralyzed from the neck down and in a catatonic state ever since. Ever since Olivia was nine, her baby sister had lived in assisted living with nurses and didn't even recognise her when she came to visit.

It was when Olivia saw the chair that she realised she was dreaming, and she began to look for more differences, curious as to what clues she may find within her own head that may allow her forgotten friend to communicate. But she didn't see anything. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, during which the only thing she found was a book hidden within her cushions that she had been reading in real life and then misplaced, she gave up wandering and collapsed on the couch. She made a note to herself to remember to search between the cushions of her real apartment next time she was there.

She sighed to herself and poured herself a tumbler full of Scotch from her living room table. When she lifted the bottle, she found an envelope, like one would usually see around a card. She opened it with interest. Inside was a card with an image of Han and Leia on the cover. (Olivia took a brief moment to muse at her subconscious. She really had no idea what it was trying to tell her with *that* particular detail). On the inside was a single handwritten sentence in a language Olivia couldn't understand, but the words made her heart pound for some reason that she couldn't remember. _**Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toi**__._ Those words were important somehow. They meant something to her; she had heard them somewhere before, and they had special meaning. She just didn't know where the hell she'd heard them or what in the world those words meant.

"It's nice to see you've finally joined me," came a dry humoured, somehow familiar voice from her right. Olivia looked over to see some of the bluest, most probing eyes, as well as the most annoyingly cocky smile, that she'd ever seen. The look both annoyed her and filled her with a strange sense of comfort. "It's been awhile, sweetheart."

**A/N:** 1) That mention of Han and Leia is a direct reference to my first Fringe fic "Role Reversals," and will make perfect sense if you read that one-shot. ;)

2) As to the story of Rachel, based on what we saw in 3x15 of Fringe: "Subject 13," I believe that part of the reason Olivia was willing to stand up to her step-father (as well as shoot him later) as a child is because of the advice young!Peter gave her, so I think that without Peter, she would have been much more timid and less likely to fight back. Because she wouldn't have seen the point.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: **See previous chapters.

**A/N: **To continue on with the way I've been writing, everything is written in Brit English instead of American English (even on the Fringe side of things) because it's how I think. I am American though, so to all my English friends, I apologise if any Americanisms or accidental American spellings pop up somewhere.

**CHAPTER 3**

The man who had spoken was lounging back against the cushions of her couch, his feet propped up on her living room table, and his head reclining against his hand, which was propped up on the armrest. He was wearing black jeans that stretched down to his ankles, which were crossed in a somewhat pristine, lackadaisical fashion. Raising her eyes higher on his form, she saw that he was also wearing a white dress shirt covered in a blue wooly jumper and a black peacoat, unbuttoned. His hair was short and slightly wavy, indicating to Olivia that it probably curled slightly when it was grown out or wet, and in addition to the "come hither" blue eyes he was blessed with, he also had a two-day stubble that she was willing to bet was kept for trying to impress the ladies with a sexiness factor and not because he had actually forgotten to shave.

The familiar feeling stranger was smiling at her - no, not smiling, but *smirking* - and a tiny cropping of crows feet began to appear along the sides of his eyes. It was a ready, confident smile, and Olivia felt something within her get indignant. She had never much liked it when people she was meeting seemed to know something about her that she didn't, and she had always hated it when the person she was seeing made such knowledge obvious. It felt suspiciously like gloating, and the only time she could stand gloating was if she could join in herself. What was worse was that the man was smiling at her as though she knew what the source of his amusement was, and she couldn't help but feel that she was letting him down in some way. And then she felt guilty about that fact, and then she felt annoyed about feeling guilty, and then she just got confused about all those feelings and attributed it to the drugs Walter and the Doctor had given her because she was getting a headache from feeling too much.

"Are you going to be drinking all of that?" the man asked, gesturing towards the bottle of scotch she had poured from moments before.

"I might," Olivia answered, suddenly feeling that two or three bottles of scotch might be needed for this day to begin making any sort of sense. She picked up the previously poured tumbler of scotch from the table and swallowed it down in one gulp, resisting the urge to shudder as the burn made its way down her throat. She poured herself another glass and spared her companion a brief glance, to see that he was merely raising his eyebrows at her in silent amusement. She downed the second glass just as quickly, and was shocked to see that he didn't appear to be overly impressed.

She handed the remainder of the bottle to him, and he gave a chuckle that caused any unease that had been within her previously to dissipate. His chuckle was a comforting sound in the silence of her flat, slightly deprecating and just a bit sarcastic. He shook the bottle at her, the liquid sloshing part of the way up the neck with the force. "What's the matter, Dunham? Two's your limit?"

Feeling slightly as though she was being challenged, she grabbed the bottle from his hand and chugged two large gulps from it. When she handed it back, he took four gulps himself, shuddering slightly afterward, and then placed it back on the table, the bottle now satisfyingly half empty.

"God, it's been too long since I've had alcohol," her companion announced, closing his eyes in apparent bliss as he leaned back against the cushions once more. "I was beginning to think I had imagined how good that burn feels, the slightly heady sensation it leaves in the pit of your stomach. But...it's just as good as I remember. You look just the same as I remember too," he added softly, opening his eyes slowly and glancing back in Olivia's direction on the other end of the couch.

"Good. Since you brought it up, we can get to business." Olivia noticed that her companion fought back a burst of laughter that he just managed to snuff down into a fond smile, but she refused to be deterred and merely continued on with her thought. "Now, I've been talking to the most trusted scientist on this subject, and apparently in some time line at some point, I knew you. And I don't know the details, but based on the way you're looking at me now and the way you seem to have made yourself at home in my flat, I would guess that you and I were pretty good friends."

"You could say that," the man threw in, grabbing the bottle off the table again and taking a swig. Some part of Olivia's brain couldn't help but feel that he was dosing himself up with liquid courage. Well, whatever helped her compatriot tell her what she needed to know as quickly as possible was acceptable as far as Olivia was concerned. She was already more than ready to get out of her own head.

"And, as a friend, I need your help," she finished, ignoring the blue eyed man's sarcastic commentary.

"My help?" the man asked dully, sounding incredulous and, if Olivia wasn't mistaken, somewhat irritated as well.

"Yes, there's a door between universes and it kind of keeps swinging forcefully shut and then creaking open again, and the universes can't handle it, and what is the matter with you?" she asked, her sentence quickly changing from an exposition to a question as she noticed her companion getting more and more angry with every word, his fist squeezing on the neck of the scotch bottle so tightly that she was surprised it didn't shatter and send the precious fluid shooting all over the room.

"Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting here?" he asked, putting the bottle down somewhat forcefully on the table and standing up to pace about the room, as though motion would help him maintain his temper. "For six months, I have been trying to contact you and Walter and Astrid and Nina - anyone who I thought could help me - and call me naive and stupid, but I thought maybe you had finally heard me. I thought maybe I could finally get out of this hell, but no. You just needed a favour." He gave himself a sharp hit on the thigh with his fist at the end of his speech, the only physical manifestation of his frustration apart from a large wrinkle on his brow between his eyes. Olivia had the insane urge to try to soothe it, or to at least ease some of the tension that had taken residence in his frame. But she thought that might be overstepping the bounds on someone she had just met. She didn't even know how close they had been; only that they had known each other and that he had clearance on knowledge of the war between universes.

He sat back down on the couch beside her, sighing heavily as he did so, the fight gone out of him. "What do you need to know?" he asked, sounding resigned and slightly tired, as though his little tirade had taken all of the energy from him.

"I need to know what's powering the bridge so that we can turn it off."

Whatever her companion had been expecting to hear, it evidently had not been that for he turned to her quickly, and stared. Olivia had been stared at many times in her life - by the overly randy teenage boys in high school and college; in a creepy fashion by men like Jones and Mitchell Loeb; in a questioning way by Walter and Astrid; with motherly like fondness from Walter's wife Elisabeth - but no one had stared at her with as piercing a gaze as the man next to her at that moment. It wasn't merely shocked and wary at the situation that her question obviously implied, but it was as though he was trying to decide if he wanted to answer her. He wasn't merely staring and thinking, he was *studying* her. But not in the way that she had noticed the Doctor having done earlier in the evening - not like a lab rat about to be sent through a maze or an ape performing funny tricks - but as though he was looking into her very soul and judging what he found there. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he took a deep breath and started talking.

"The bridge was created six months ago to your knowledge, am I correct?" the man asked, his probing gaze prompting her to speak.

"That's right, yes. That's when we noticed it. 6:02 am."

"6:02 am," he repeated back softly, the time apparently striking something within him. Olivia assumed that if it was relevant he would explain the significance in due course. "Well, you're both right and wrong. The bridge was created at that time, but simultaneously, it's also always existed and always will exist, and yet at one point, it never existed."

"So, the bridge was created through some sort of time change?" Olivia clarified. The man smiled that now familiar smirk at her, seemingly impressed at her understanding of what was (to Olivia's mind) both a non-nonsensical, yet strangely believable, concept.

"Exactly. At some point, someone went back in time and created that bridge. Probably for a very good reason. But it's running on energy, and eventually all energy is used up or changed into a form that the power source doesn't recognise. And, what the idiot who created the bridge probably didn't realise at the time, is that the power choice he or she picked would only last so long. And now you're basically screwed."

"So, there's nothing we can do?" Olivia asked, her hands falling into her lap as she felt whatever little bubble of hope had been growing in her chest during this conversation get popped and disappear.

"I didn't say that," the man said, lifting his finger and pointing it at her slightly in emphasis.

"Well, you may not have said outright, but you damn well insinuated as such," Olivia retorted, crossing her arms across her chest and leaning back into the corner where the armrest met the back of the couch, mimicking her companion's position on the other end of the furniture.

He gave a weak chuckle and the look he gave her was incredibly fond, as though he relished the argument. If he did, he was certainly the only one of the party that was doing so. Olivia was inwardly fuming at her sarcastic, non-informative - and still nameless! - compatriot. She wanted answers, not riddles. So far, he had only told her what she already knew, and instead of coming right out and answering a simple question, he seemed perfectly content to stare at her and answer questions with other questions. It became obvious to her that, however she had known this man before, he had evidently been a huge pain her arse, and spent way too much time around Walter if his non-existent answers were anything to go by.

"Look, it's hard for me to answer your questions without telling you some things that, at this point, I don't think you're ready to know. There's a whole other time you've forgotten, Olivia -" the blonde agent sucked in a breath at the way he casually dropped out her first name, which was trademark of a good friend, and not a mere work colleague, "a whole other life. And the bridge is nearly impossible to discuss without you knowing all the details of that. What I can tell you is that there's a reason why it's me that's talking to you."

"Yes, the Doctor - the specialist I was telling you about - said that you'd been wiped out of existence because of the building of the bridge, and that you were important to the reality he came from."

"The Doctor? You mentioned him to me before, in our original time line. He's there with you now?"

"Yeah, he said that I had gotten trapped in Walternate's world for a while. Says he helped me escape, and strangely I can't help but trust him. Which is why I think he's telling me the truth. Same as how I know he must have been telling the truth when he said you and I knew each other; from the second you appeared on my couch, I've felt perfectly at ease. I never feel that..." Olivia stopped her sentence, suddenly uncomfortable though she could never explain why.

"Well, that's great! If he remembers the original time line, then he can help! Olivia, you have to tell him to turn off that machine!"

"He knows! He said that the two universes need to be kept separate! He knows all that! He just doesn't know how to turn it off, and for some reason he thinks that I do, or that you do, but that because you are now all scrambled electrical signals or something, you could only tell me!"

Olivia's hands had started to fly in her exasperation and urgency, and the man outright laughed at her, his laughter growing more raucous as she became angrier. As she glared at him, that fond look came over his face again and Olivia felt the heat of embarrassment at being studied flush to her face.

"Okay, there's a way to turn off the bridge. And, as usual in your life, Olivia, it all comes down to you. You'll need to picture it as a machine - a simple machine with a power switch - and you'll have to turn it off."

"How?"

"With the power of your mind," he answered, totally straight-faced with not the slightest sound of sarcasm in his tone. Olivia thought he had gone around the bend.

"My mind?"

"It's not that far fetched, Olivia. You turned off all those lights for Jones all those years ago. One switch should be easy compared to that!"

Olivia felt something inside of her ice over. She had not turned those lights off. She had failed - dismally, as the hundreds of dead bodies currently in mausoleums and graves would testify. Whatever time line had contained the blue eyed man before her was better in at least one regard.

"I didn't do that," she admitted quietly. She watched in somewhat morbid fascination as her companion's eyes widened and the subsequent setting of his jaw as he prepared to hear the different version of events. "I tried, and I almost got there - almost understood what Jones wanted from me, but... I just wasn't quick enough, and my bosses forced me out of the building and to a safe distance a few minutes before it blew."

The man was silent for a few moments, his fingers on his lips as he thought. To avoid the silence he seemed content to maintain, she continued speaking. "It began a very disturbing trend for me," she said, staring down at her hands. She felt a bit as though she was speaking to a therapist, only she would never be as open with one. She found herself shocked to discover how easy it was to open up to this man - this achingly, terrifyingly familiar man - and she was heartened to see that his eyes showed only kindness and understanding, though there was no pity in his gaze. She was thankful for that, as pity was one emotion she could never stand. "It was a trend of failure. Every time something would come up that would require these so called 'abilities' that I was supposed to have, it was like I choked. They always seemed to require an emotion that I just couldn't quite tap into no matter how hard I tried. Walter said it was fear, but no matter how afraid I thought I was, it never seemed to be enough."

When she looked up, she was shocked to discover that her companion was now directly in front of her. At some point during her speech, he had abandoned his spot on the opposite end of the couch and was now squatting on the floor in front of her, his arms resting on his knees. He grabbed her hands with his right hand and urged her chin up with his left. Her green eyes took instant comfort from the familiar blue pools. "Olivia Dunham, you have never failed at anything a day in your life. Sometimes, you just can't save everybody. And it's not right and it's not fair, and I know you would kill yourself trying to make the world work otherwise, but you did EVERYTHING you could. I know that. But things have changed from the world I was a part of - that you were a part of - and you've had a rougher time of it because of that. Maybe there's something - apart from me - that used to be here that isn't now, and it may be something you need. To be honest, I don't know what that is - it's probably something from your personal life that you didn't tell me about - but it's effected how you see the world. You just need to figure out what that something is."

"Like you said, things have changed. I'm not the person you knew before. Maybe this version of me is just a much bigger failure."

Her friend chuckled again, though this time it lacked the mirth of his previous laughter. It was more a huff of air. "There are some factors about us as people that are just part of who we are. They're not fostered, they're not nurtured. They're practically DNA. And one of those things that could never change about you is how much you care about everyone else, to the detriment of yourself. I once told you that I had never met anyone who could the things you do, and the same holds true for this version of yourself," he whispered to her - so softly, that she had to lean towards him slightly to hear him. "If there's anyone who has what it takes to shut off that bridge and do what needs to be done, it's you."

"Well, what needs to be done after the bridge is turned off?"

"You have to turn the power source off."

"And how do I do that?"

For the first time in the conversation, her companion looked grave - sad, brokenhearted, and somewhat afraid. It took everything Olivia had not to throw her arms around him and comfort him in his obvious distress.

"You have to kill me."

* * *

><p>An hour after Olivia had entered the tank, the Doctor still had not removed his eyes from the monitoring equipment. His vision had rested there seconds after Olivia had gone silent, and they had not moved except to blink and glance occasionally at Rose and Astrid to monitor their activities. Most people would merely see squiggles and lines when they looked at the readings, but the Doctor saw a story. About forty minutes previous, there had been a noticeable jump on the line, indicating that Olivia had received a shock. Due to the lack of distressed sounds coming from the tank, the Doctor surmised that whatever or whomever she saw was a welcome visitor. The subsequent squiggles that were outside the norm (though nowhere near as large as the initial jump) told the Doctor that Olivia was learning some truths, or theories, or some sort of information that was causing her either distress or annoyance. It was difficult to tell without hearing any verbal cues.<p>

Walter had been keeping an eye on the young, blonde agent as well, fussing over her readings like a father watching his child undergo a medical procedure. Granted, he was a lot more calm and logical than most fathers would be in such a situation, but he was fastidious about her in a way that the Doctor was sure he wouldn't be for many other agents. The Doctor couldn't blame Walter for that; he had quite the soft spot for the agent himself.

"You know, the first time she did this, Astro acted like she was sitting on a hedgehog and Elisabeth kept cursing at me for not being concerned enough," came Walter's older, slightly reedy voice from the Doctor's right. The Doctor turned to him with a small smile lifting up one side of his face. He wondered if Walter even realised he had mispronounced Astrid's name. "Elisabeth turned out to be right of course," the scientist added, a little bit more softly, as though the fact that he was wrong was something that should not be spoken of aloud. The Doctor could understand that; when one is rarely wrong, the few times when he or she *is* wrong is absolutely mortifying, much more so than it would be for any other person. Not that the Doctor had ever been wrong, at least to his memory. "Olivia was stuck seeing the image of her traitor boyfriend appearing to her for months. She was absolutely terrified; thought she was turning out to be as crazy as me, you see. Elisabeth gave me the cold shoulder for weeks after that first case."

"Well, I don't think it'll be a problem this time," the Doctor responded, touching the other scientist briefly on the shoulder as he walked around him to view another piece of monitoring equipment. "You see, before you were hooking her up to a living being, correct?"

"Yes. Her friend - Mr John Scott - had been hit with a toxin that made his skin translucent. Very nasty, indeed. There was information we needed that only he would know, so we hooked her up in much the same way that you did just now."

"Well, what we're now doing now is a bit different. There's no person for her to connect to, merely energy. I mean, in her head, she's speaking to a person because that's how her brain interprets the information, but the person in reality is non-existent. Whispers from a ghost," the Doctor ended, whispering slightly to himself.

"But why a stranger?" Walter inquired, a smile on his face. The Doctor was amused to find that the man was enjoying his company so much, but then again (the Doctor reasoned) the mad scientist hadn't had many people of his mental calibre to chat with in quite some time. It was yet another difference from the Secretary that the Doctor couldn't help but note. In the Doctor's previous adventure with Olivia, the Secretary had seemed to see the Doctor's intelligence as beneath him somehow, whereas this reality's version of Walter seemed quite happy to swap ideas with him. The Doctor supposed that ten years in a state prison with under-intelligent convicts would do that to a man.

"I mean, when you were describing the situation to all of us earlier, you and Olivia, and Ross - " the Doctor tried and failed to hide a snicker at the mispronunciation of Rose's name, " - you said that Olivia would be talking to someone she knew but probably didn't remember. And you said it was because of a re-written time line." The Doctor listened as Walter ranted, seeing the glint in the seemingly older man's eyes as he came to what the Doctor knew would frighteningly be the correct conclusion. "And the only reason why a person she knew would have so much information on the re-written time line would be is if he was involved, which means that he was a scientist who knew the extreme complexities of time and space bends, which means..." The Doctor watched as Walter finally understood the truth of the situation, and he watched as something inside of Walter seemed to break. "Which means that he caused this. "

"Yes," the Doctor answered, firmly but not without pity.

"And I probably helped, didn't I?"

"I would assume so, yes." The Doctor's brown eyes looked down, no longer able to meet the scientist's blue ones, which were beginning to fill with tears. The Doctor knew what Walter's question would be before he asked it, and did not have it within him to give the answer he needed to hear. Some things are too much for a father to hear, whether they remember their son or not. The Doctor kept his eyes glued to the pens sticking out of Walter's chest pocket on his lab coat, afraid that somehow Walter would be able to see the mutual pain of loss from a fellow father.

"Why would I do that? Even I know of the laws of nature and just how far to take them and when to stop. Belly may have not known, and he may have caused this war, but I am nowhere near as ambitious. What happened in that other time line to cause me to do something so...crazy? Why would I?"

The Doctor did the only thing he could do at that juncture. He lied.

"I don't know."

The older, curly haired man hid his face in his hands. The Doctor dealt with his guilt and worry by looking over at Rose and Astrid who, previously, had been deep in conversation about some new hacker computer programme that Torchwood had been using for years and that this reality was just now releasing to the public. As though sensing the Doctor's eyes on her, Rose turned her head slightly and frowned at the look on his face. She cocked her head slightly and lifted her eyebrows in their nonverbal communication of asking if he was alright, which he answered with a small, though entirely unenthusiastic, smile.

He saw as Rose tapped on Astrid's shoulder and tipped her head in his and Walter's direction. The Doctor gave a small huff of amusement and rolled his eyes as Rose and Astrid walked toward his direction. Astrid immediately went to Walter's side, and started to bring him out of his funk by asking him questions about the readings on the monitors and suggesting that they both go for lunch with Elisabeth while Olivia slept off the drugs later. Meanwhile, Rose had grabbed the Doctor by the arm and brought him over to a private corner of the lab.

"Okay. Something's bothering you, so what is it?"

"It's nothing I haven't seen before, Rose. I promise. It's just hard to discuss something this complicated with a man like that. He's REALLY smart. I mean really. And I respect the man and hate lying to him, and trust me, that means a lot coming from me. It's hard to talk about saving the universe when I know what he has to sacrifice. Even if he doesn't realise he's giving it away."

"What do you mean?"

"You remember when I asked Olivia about the Secretary, and his rise to power Over There."

"Yeah. Sounded like she knew the right version of events for this time line, so far as I could remember."

"Right. And if there's one thing that story shows, it's that there's balance. Once, it was one Peter Bishop that survived, and the war started because of that - one death and one life. In this reality, it was one Elisabeth Bishop - one died and one lived. Before, I thought the problem was that Peter Bishop needed to exist, but what if it's the opposite?"

"What do you mean? He didn't exist now and we still have a problem."

"No, Rose, he *does* exist. Somehow, even if he and the rest of the universe isn't totally cognisant of it, he *does* exist. He wouldn't be able to communicate with Olivia at all if he didn't. And what if the real solution is to eradicate him from reality completely?"

Rose was silent, staring at him in wide eyed disbelief.

"Could you do that to her? Make her go in there and make her speak with someone that she was probably in love with in that other time line - not that she ever said, but I think I'm pretty good at reading such things by now - and then tell her that she has to make sure he's wiped from existence? She already doesn't remember him."

The Doctor steeled himself for a real argument as he saw Rose Tyler begin to get worked up. He loved the woman dearly, but she wasn't half frightening when she got in a strop, and she had a slap just as strong as her mother's. The Doctor fought the impulse to rub his jaw as his mind made the comparison. He remembered once telling Rose in her early days that traveling the universe showed a different kind of morality and that she could get used to it or go home. That wasn't really an option for her now, and being half-human himself he was a bit more sympathetic to her morality issues. But, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one as far as he was concerned. Unless that one was Rose Tyler, not that he was ever telling her that, for she would probably slap him for his white knight complex on that one.

Rose's eyes teared up, and he knew that what she was about to say next would probably make him want to bury his head in the sand. "Would you be able to do that to me? Just wipe me out of existence completely? Forget me?" she asked.

And there it was. The "putting-oneself-in-someone-else's-shoes" card. Damn, how he hated that one. He looked down at his plimsolls, something in his guts jumping over and over itself like a five year old on a trampoline. He felt vaguely like he might be sick, and decided he did not really want to entertain any thoughts about what Rose was insinuating.

He had wiped her from existence once. He had wiped everyone and everything he had ever known from his personal existence - a new name, a new personality, a new time, and no TARDIS. And it still hadn't been enough. He couldn't remember what he called his sonic screwdriver, or even the TARDIS. For once, even those annoying Daleks had been wiped from him. But he remembered Rose's name, and he knew that any thoughts of her brought an unbearable sadness, and no matter how much he tried he could never convince her to turn around and come back.

And just like that, he knew how he could save the universe.

"Rose Tyler, you're a bloody genius," he exclaimed, grabbing her head and kissing her hard and briefly on her surprised lips.

"Well, yeah, of course I am. But...what did I do?" she asked, ending on a small incredulous laugh.

"You asked the right questions," he answered her, pulling her into a brief hug, and smiling down at the confused smile that was adorning her face. "And now," he announced loudly, making Astrid and Walter's heads turn to him in surprise, "we need to wake Agent Dunham here. The Doctor is in, and we've got an experiment to run."


	4. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER 4**

Olivia's breath hitched in her throat at the man's words, and came out as a small hiccough. Even though she was fairly certain she had heard him correctly, she found herself asking him to repeat what he had said, though she wasn't sure why.

"You have to kill me," he repeated, sounding much more sure and unemotional the second time he said it.

"Why?" she asked. She felt as though she was having an out of body experience - she could see his mouth moving and understood the words he was saying, but it was as though she couldn't comprehend him; he was speaking down a long tunnel and his words were muffled underneath the sound of her loudly beating heart. Everything about her own nervous system felt amplified - she could feel her chest expand as she breathed, could hear the carbon dioxide as it rasped out through her oesophagus, could feel her pulse in all the key arteries of her anatomy. She thought if she focused hard enough she may even be able to _hear_ her thoughts as they bounced around her brain and joined together to form coherent sentences. Those thoughts sounded suspiciously like silence, if silence had a sound.

"Because it's my fault all of this is happening," said her friend, standing to his feet from where he had knelt in front of her moments before and running his hand through his hair in much the same way that she had seen the Doctor do when he was writing his theorems on the whiteboard. "Something happened in our original time line - I made a choice, and it ended badly for everyone. Walter saw a chance to put it right, but I was the only one who could do it, so I came back to this time from the future to put it right."

"Wait, Walter had a hand in this?" Olivia asked, standing up as well. She felt odd sitting on the sofa when her friend was pacing so emphatically back and forth across the floor in front of her.

"Like there was ever any doubt in your mind?" her friend retorted, facing her with raised eyebrows. Olivia could only nod in accession to his point. Walter was _always_ involved. The man took a deep breath and continued speaking. "Now, I knew there was a chance that there would be major changes, especially with my own time line. Apart from having seen my fair share of sci-fi, I was lucky enough to have inherited a really high IQ from Walter."

Olivia couldn't help but cut in at this point. "You're Walter's _son_?" The question came out without her having a chance to check her incredulity, but the second she had asked the question, she thought herself stupid for not noticing it before. There was a striking resemblance between the man standing before her and the odd, older man she knew was watching over her in the lab as she dreamt. The younger man's slightly curly hair even resembled not only Walter, but also Elisabeth's, own curls.

The young man ignored her question - which she even admitted to herself was meant to be rhetorical - and merely sent a quick, piercing, blue eyed glance in her direction in response.

"I thought I knew what I was doing. Walter and I discussed the plan to use the Machine for weeks, and we thought we had accounted for everything. But… At first, I thought maybe the plan had succeeded with no flaws - I stood there and talked with you and Walter and Walternate and your alternate for a few minutes, but then it was like you all just ignored me. And then, after a few minutes, I found myself standing on the Machine again, even though I remembered climbing off of it moments before.

"And then I realised what had happened - I had overwritten myself. You couldn't acknowledge me because you didn't remember me. So, when I would see you or Walter or Astrid - even Brandon - I would try to speak to you. It never had any effect on anyone though. Sometimes, I thought I had gotten through to you - you would turn your head slightly when I would yell for you, but then you'd go on with what you were doing."

Olivia's heart skipped an uncomfortable beat in her chest, and she felt slightly nauseated. "It was the ringing," she muttered softly, causing her friend to turn his head to her in question. "Whenever I would enter into the bridge room, I would get this humming sound in my ears. I always thought it was because of the fact that Cortexiphan makes it so that I have slightly super-sonic hearing after I travel Over There. I just assumed it was a lighter version of that. I guess, in retrospect, it was probably just you."

"And because I'm just some weird sort of energy in our universe now, your brain could only interpret my words as electrical patterns, which caused my messages to sound like tinnitus," the man said, the confidence of his statement making him sound exactly like his father.

"I still don't understand why I have to kill you," Olivia prompted. It appeared her brain couldn't stay away from this particular problem - granted, its preoccupation with it made sense. It wasn't every day a person was told, in a matter of fact way, that one would have to kill a friend. And it was probably even more rare that the person who needed to be killed was the one encouraging the killer to do the killing.

"The point is that I was supposed to be erased completely - the re-written time line was dependant on that. You and the others were never supposed to know that I was here - no memories, no allusions, no hints."

"No tinnitus," Olivia added in, hoping some light humour would eradicate the building pressure in her chest.

"No tinnitus," her friend agreed, that comforting smirk appearing on his face again. "But, pieces of me are bleeding through, and I think it's because you've been receiving electrical signals from me your whole life."

"What do you mean?" Olivia asked.

"For instance, why are you reading that book I see sitting on the table?" he asked, his blue eyes going from her green ones to the book she had previously dragged from between the cushions of her couch before he had appeared.

"I read it once about ten years ago. I thought it was sarcastic and witty. It amused me."

"But that's the thing, Olivia. In the original time line, you had never read that book before a year ago. You read it because _I_ suggested it to you. It's _my_ favourite book."

Olivia stared long and hard at the cover of the book - _If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him_ - and felt something within her break apart. She couldn't help but wonder, as she had a couple of years before when memories of John Scott's bled through into her own memories, just how many of her traits and thoughts were her own and how many belonged to this nameless stranger.

"Something is keeping me here, Olivia. That Machine was supposed to be a one-time use deal - the 'bridge' was supposed to be created with my life energy and it should have sustained itself - but because I'm kind of stuck between being and not being, the 'bridge' is stuck that way too. Instead of becoming a doorway with a never-ending entry option, it's become more like a doorstop, and it's because I'm getting in the way. And it has to stop."

"He's right, you know," came another voice from Olivia's kitchen. Both Olivia and her male friend turned their head towards the right side of Olivia's apartment to see the Doctor leaning back in one of Olivia's kitchen chairs, a saucer in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other held halfway toward his mouth, his feet propped up on the kitchen table. The Doctor took a sip of the tea, and then scrunched up his face in disgust. "Blech, your tea is cold. Blimey, even the inside of your head takes a frigid stance." He must have seen the disapproving glares that Olivia was sending his way because he began gaping his mouth like a fish out of water and quickly set his chair down on all fours before standing with his hands going in his trouser pockets. "BUT, more important things than tea. Right. Um, yes, anyway…"

The Doctor cleared his throat.

"Your non-corporeal friend is correct though. His connection to you - unknowingly being partly in your head - is why the 'bridge' is breaking down. He's - to use our previous computer analogy - overloading your universe's system. For everything to be set to rights, the Machine needs to be destroyed."

"You two keep talking about a Machine," Olivia inserted. "I've never seen any Machine. What Machine are you talking about?"

"You have seen it, Olivia," the Doctor added. "You just don't acknowledge it. There's a portion of the lab in the 'bridge room' that neither you nor anyone else in your group will approach. You give the area a wide berth, even though you don't outwardly think about it. But you never step there because even though you can't see it, a part of you is physically aware of its presence. And that's where your friend here has been this whole time. Standing there, in the world but not a part of it at all. For your whole life, and yet only for a few months."

"I can't believe I'm listening to this and not thinking you're insane," Olivia muttered, sitting back down on the couch and putting her head in her hands. She was surprised at her lack of flinch when she felt someone sit next to her and felt a warm hand brace itself on her shoulder. It felt foreign to her, and at the same time she knew somewhere deep inside her that it was far from the first time that the owner of that hand had done such an action. The lack of familiarity of it on her part made her want to weep.

"Well, in all fairness, this whole conversation is happening in your head, so to think me insane means to think yourself insane," the Doctor said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet on the opposite side of her coffee table.

"It certainly wouldn't be the first time," Olivia retorted, lifting her head out of her hands and turning towards her still silent friend. "You're awfully quiet about all this."

"Hey," her friend answered, chuckling in a slightly self-deprecating way, "I was willing to write myself out of existence before now. It just didn't really work the first time."

"That other reality must have really sucked, huh?" Olivia asked, only half joking.

Her friend was remarkably serious and the hard look in his blue eyes caused her heart to skip in a much more pleasurable way than it had done previously in the conversation. "It had its perks," was all he said, and then looked away from her back towards the Doctor.

"So, I'm guessing that since we're both in Olivia's head and not Walter's, that she's the one who has been keeping me grounded here?" her friend asked the man in pinstripes.

"Yep," said the man still bouncing in his plimsolls, popping the "P" with an un-necessarily loud enunciation. "Agent Dunham here has been keeping quite the bed and breakfast of mental visitors. But, as with all the others whom have wandered in her brain before you, it's time for you to check out, Mr Bishop."

"Wait, you knew the whole time who would be in my head?" Olivia asked, suddenly angry at the knowledge that this overly exuberant man that she apparently had met on an adventure she didn't remember taking, knew more about her own personal history than she herself did. She couldn't help but wonder what other little things about her past, and her relationship with this nameless yet familiar stranger were things the Doctor was already aware of and didn't deem important to impart to her.

"I told you it was a 'he,' didn't I? You didn't think I was just guessing, did you?" the Doctor asked, quirking one eyebrow up at her. Olivia tried not to feel as though he was rating her mental intelligence based on her question, but his expression made that difficult. "After all, he wasn't just your best friend. He was also, at one point, the son of Dr Walter Bishop and also the son of the Secretary of Defence, and then - presto chango - one day, he wasn't anymore. Major change like that occurs, and you think it doesn't occur to me that maybe he had something to do with it?"

"So, what do we do?" Olivia asked, her heart already feeling heavy, though she didn't quite understand why. "How do we write him out of existence?" Olivia kept her eyes carefully trained on the Doctor as she asked this question. For some reason, the thought of looking at her friend while talking about making him completely gone just felt wrong. And it hurt something inside of her and made her feel queasy in her stomach. 'Survivor's guilt,' she told herself. 'He's not even gone yet, and I've already got survival's guilt.'

The Doctor gave her a piercing, sympathetic look with his deep, brown eyes. But surprisingly, he said nothing. Instead, he merely glanced over at her friend's direction and though she did not see her blue-eyed compatriot's response, the facial expression given must have been more than answer enough for the Doctor.

"I think it's best Mr Bishop give you those answers, Agent Dunham. I actually only came to tell you that you need to wake up. You said 6.02 a.m. was when the 'bridge' was formed, so to destroy it we should use the same time. And it's 5.50 a.m. now. I thought there would be less shock to you this way. I'll give you both a couple of minutes, and then I'll wake you, Miss Dunham."

The Doctor gave them both a small, hesitant smile and then disappeared from the room.

Olivia felt like there was a lead weight in her chest, pulling what little bit of hope she had down into the region of her stomach. She felt the air going in and out of her lungs, but she still felt like she was struggling for oxygen. In a few minutes, no matter what method it was that her friend told her to use, he would be gone. She would no longer have tinnitus in the 'bridge room,' and she would no longer probably have such a vested interest in random books with sardonic humour. Hell, hundreds of little quirks about herself would probably disappear, and her best friend would _truly_ be gone, and…

And she would never even know that anything was missing. Hell, she almost hadn't known he was missing this time around - she had simply become an amalgamation of her own quirks and his. Now she would simply be herself, and while the thought was freeing in its idealism, the notion now just made her feel lonely. He was sacrificing everything for her universe and she would never even know he had done it. The unfairness of it all made her inner cop bristle in indignation. And the woman inside of her - the part that was simply Olivia, and had lost so much already - just wanted to curl up alone in a room somewhere and cry for something that she was about to lose and yet will have never lost at all.

"So, how do I do it?" she asked after a few silent seconds. His blue eyes quickly left the place on the floor that the Doctor had been standing on moments before. "How do I kill you?"

The man stared at her for a few seconds, and it was as he did this that Olivia realised that what she had been classifying as 'staring,' was, in fact, not 'staring' at all. He was _memorising _her, as though she was something precious and rare - as though she was so complex that all the pieces of the puzzle that make up Olivia Dunham could be easily mismatched and sullied. It made Olivia feel distinctly uncomfortable and yet pleased.

"You have to let me go, Olivia," he said, standing up from where he was sitting at her side, and coming to stand in front of her. "Your feelings for me - and Astrid's and Walter's too, to a lesser extent, I guess - kept me here even when I wasn't supposed to be here. You three loved me enough to try and keep me here, even subconsciously." Olivia felt herself flush when he said the word 'love' so casually, but then reminded herself that he didn't necessarily mean it in a romantic sense (even if the looks he had been giving her since he first appeared on her couch hinted that the romantic inclinations were there, at least on his side). "And I would love all three of you for that, even if I didn't love you all more than anything already. But, for this to work, you have to let all that go."

"I don't know how I can make them forget."

"I don't think you need to worry about them," the scientist answered. "I think they used whatever connecting energy they had with me just to keep me between realities in the first place. But you already had more energy when it comes to the walls between dimensions than anyone we've ever met, including the Doctor. At least, that's what you told me when you came back from your adventure Over There last year. And I think you've been using that energy to keep me here, even if you didn't realise you were doing it."

"Is that why I get a headache every time I go to the 'bridge room?'" she asked, certain parts of her recent history finally beginning to make sense with this development.

"Exactly. You are unknowingly using what little energy you have to feed the Machine - to keep me alive - and it's killing you. Even if it was just for that reason alone, I would tell you to stop."

"But how do I do that?"

"You just…decide. The energy will reach its nexus at 6.02 a.m., and you're going to have to make a choice, the same as I did six months ago. And you have to decide to forget. And then the 'bridge' will run on a different sort of energy, this crisis will have never happened, the Doctor will use the 'bridge' to go back Over There, and you…you'll live the life I always thought you deserved to have."

Olivia wasn't sure why, but she was pretty sure her heart was breaking. Even though she knew that in a few minutes, she would have no memory of this conversation - that her friend's sacrifice would mean absolutely nothing to her at all - she wanted to take this moment to acknowledge it. She stood up to face him eye to eye.

"Thank you," she said, her voice coming out more breathy than steady, even though she had tried hard to make it even.

"Think nothing of it," he said with a smile that was decidedly fake. "Your life will probably be a whole lot less complicated now that Walter won't have made half the mistakes he made before, and I'm not there to make wise ass remarks every five minutes."

"I sincerely doubt that," Olivia muttered, barely comprehending the turn the conversation had taken. In less than an hour, she had met a man she must have known previously, gotten comfortable with him, grown to see him as a friend, and now, in less than five minutes, she would be back to never having thought of him before. She felt like an awful person, and she hadn't even written him out of existence yet.

"Olivia," her friend said, using his right index finger to lift her chin up to stare him in the eyes, "don't blame yourself over what you have to do. I want to do this. You - the universe - you're both worth it. I'm sorry the responsibility falls to you, and that's partially my fault, I'm sure. But, you can do this. I know it. You're the only one who can."

Olivia, for reasons she could not understand, found herself fighting back tears. Aside from Walter and Elisabeth, she had never met anyone who had such unquestioning faith in her. She wondered briefly if maybe that was what she had been missing that night at the light box, in Jacksonville, and in front of that apartment complex - someone who had unceasing faith in her abilities. Olivia realised then that a part of her, even though she could not have named it if she had tried, had been missing him for her entire life. She had never felt empty, or that anything was missing - she didn't dream of dark haired strangers on those few nights she slept, and she didn't hear his voice whispering to her in the dark depths of her mind. But maybe on a more physical level she had been missing him and not known it.

Olivia felt a warm tear work its way down her cheek as her friend placed a stubbly kiss to her forehead. It should have felt strange or awkward, or any number of bittersweet things. Instead it only felt sad. An innocent, sweet goodbye from a friend she had never had the chance to meet or get to know. And he was sacrificing himself for the woman she may have been, the woman she was, and probably all the versions of herself she could never be. And she couldn't even find it within herself to meet his eyes as she felt a second tear work itself from her eyes. Olivia breathed in on a slight, breathy sob.

And opened her eyes to see the Doctor and Rose Tyler staring at her, the Doctor's fingers on her temples.

* * *

><p>Rose watched as Olivia quickly took stock of the 'bridge room,' and came to the realisation that she was truly awake. Rose averted her eyes from Olivia as the older blonde haired woman tried to covertly wipe away the small tear tracks from around her eyes while everyone looked at her. Rose, Astrid, and the Doctor all did the best they could to pretend not to notice the usually stoic federal agent show a tiny bit of emotion. This effort was wasted as Dr Bishop handed Olivia a large handkerchief and told her that she should never be embarrassed to shed a few tears over absent friends.<p>

Olivia merely kept her eyes on the handkerchief and avoided eye contact with Walter as she thanked him. Rose didn't miss the pointed look between the Doctor and Olivia, and Rose guessed that Olivia had either been told or had guessed that the guest in her head was in some way related to Dr Bishop. Rose did not envy Olivia the burden of that knowledge.

"Now, we have approximately one minute before the Machine sends out its final pulse, and then the 'bridge' will either collapse and take both universes with it, or we can dismantle it manually - and by 'we,' I mean _you_, Agent Dunham - and then we'll experience a true re-write, assuming what you do works."

"How is a 'true' rewrite different from the rewrite that's already happened?" Olivia asked, her brow wrinkling as her confusion worked its way across her face.

"It'll be true in that even Rose and I will have no memory of this event. Time will be completely over-written. No hiccoughs. The two realities will have never merged."

"And my friend will be completely gone," Olivia muttered. The woman looked as though she had aged even further in the last hour since she had climbed in the tank - the dark circles around her eyes had enough baggage for a year abroad, and there was a defeated slump in the woman's shoulders. And her eyes! Her eyes carried a sadness to them that Rose hadn't seen since she and her first incarnation of the Doctor had stood on the pavement together in London after watching the Earth burn and he had revealed to her that he was all alone in the universe. Rose wished with every fibre of her being that there was something she could do to help the agent; she and the Doctor were, to put things simply, taking her companion away and letting her roam the universe alone. Rose suddenly felt like a villain in a piece where she had intended to be an hero.

"Yes," the Doctor quietly affirmed. "I'm so, so sorry."

"I'm fine," the other woman setting, raising her chin and she faced the direction of the Machine. Her eyes took on a steely resolve as she gave one final sniff. "I'm gonna be fine. He was willing to make this sacrifice for everyone. The least I can do is honour it."

"As always, you are _brilliant_, Olivia Dunham," the Doctor told her, though Rose was certain the Doctor had never said it in as sombre a voice as he did just then. It lacked the usual sound of pride and exultation, and sounded more as though he was comforting her. Rose had never thought she could hear praise sound sympathetic, but it did.

Suddenly, Rose was aware of a shimmering taking over the room. Everything looked as though she were viewing it through a thing of gold cellophane while extremely drunk, though minus the lack of equilibrium that usually came with inebriation.

She watched as Olivia closed her eyes in apparent concentration. The Machine, previously out of view to everyone in the room unless they glanced it from the corner of their eye and focused, was now shimmering into focus. Rose felt like a voyeur as she watched Olivia open her eyes and stare into the eyes of the man in the Machine. And all he did was smile at her, a wide smile that reminded Rose of the sort of smile that graced the Doctor's face when he saw her after a long absence. And then, he and the Machine simply faded from existence.

And Rose and the Doctor didn't even have time to share sympathetic looks with each other before they disappeared from Olivia's universe as well.

* * *

><p>Rose sat bored in the hallway outside of the special labs room at the Statue of Liberty. The Doctor had been asked to teach a special seminar to some of the lab technicians about String Theory and how it applied to rift technology. What the people working for the Department of Defence didn't know was that the Doctor was telling them total lies - the last thing the Doctor wanted was for a bunch of American scientists to start ripping down the walls between dimensions again. Things were still shaky from the Reality Bomb, even three years after the fact, and the Doctor was wary of the potential for such things happening again. So, he did whatever he could to quietly and discretely subvert authority.<p>

Rose shifted slightly in her chair. It was made of plastic and the back curved slightly. It was supposed to be a healthier chair - the Department of Defence only took the most up-to-date in terms of following health and safety codes - but Rose found the whole thing distinctly uncomfortable. The curve at what was supposed to be the base of her spine actually curved halfway up her back, and the hard plastic kept sticking to her thighs. She inwardly cursed herself for wearing a skirt, which was meant more to drive the Doctor crazy than for practicality, but he had seemed distracted in any case, so she needn't have bothered. For the last few days, the Doctor had a distinct look on his face that she couldn't place. The closest description she could think of was the look on a dog's face when it has an itch that it can't quite scratch, but the Doctor wasn't a dog so the look hardly made sense.

Suddenly, Rose became aware of a ringing in her ears; the sort of which comes around after being surrounded by loud machinery for a very long period of time. She worked her jaw around and brought a finger to one ear to rub it, hoping to sooth out the symptom, but to no avail. The ringing remained.

She suddenly noticed she could no longer hear the Doctor's voice from the lab, and rose to glance in the door's tiny observation window, only to see that the Doctor too was trying to work a ringing from his ear.

Rose opened the door to the lab only to see that she and the Doctor were shimmering - a shimmering look that she had never seen before, as through a drunken, golden kaleidoscope. She shook her head as the ringing became more and more uncomfortable and when she stopped she discovered that she and the Doctor were no longer in the lab room with the younger lab technicians. Instead, she was staring at a woman with long blonde hair and the Secretary of Defence (who for some reason was wearing a lab coat), and a young woman with dark, curly hair. And the blonde haired woman was lying on the ground, screaming in pain with her hands cradling her head.

Rose ran to the woman on instinct, ignoring the confused and awed looks of the Secretary and the darker haired woman. Rose put the woman's head in her lap, and ran her hands across the roots of her hair, hoping to somehow sooth her. She looked up at the Doctor, who was staring down at the woman with undisguised pity in his eyes, as though he understood the source of her pain.

"Doctor, what's wrong with her? What can we do to help?" Rose asked, wiping away the tears of pain that were unknowingly pouring from the woman's eyes.

"I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do to help. This is a battle she has to fight on her own."

"What are you talking about?"

"She's bringing something from nothing. That takes a lot of energy to begin with, but she's doing it on a metaphysical level - whatever she's created will exist because she wants it to do. That takes a lot of power."

Rose felt an inward sense of panic as the woman's nose started to bleed, and she started to seize slightly. Rose drew the woman up further in her arms, and the Doctor leant down and grabbed the woman's legs to keep them from thrashing.

"How much longer will this go on?" Rose asked, wondering if she could handle listening to the woman's nearly inhuman screams much longer.

"Only about 47 more seconds," the Doctor surmised. Rose was about to ask how he could possibly know how long it took to create something from nothing before two things happened. 1) she remembered he was the Doctor and he always just seemed to *know* these things. 2) a man was starting to suddenly flicker into being on the floor not too far ahead of them, though he was nowhere near corporeal as of yet.

"Why is she screaming like that?"

"The only way to bring a person back from non-existence is through memory. And all memories hurt," the Doctor said, dropping the woman's legs and coming up closer to her head, cradling the woman's face in his hands as her screams eased a little and reduced to mere sobs. "I'm sorry," he whispered to her. "I'm so sorry. I wish I could have warned you. But I did this the only way I could and still have a chance of it working. I know it hurts, and I'm so, so sorry. But you did brilliantly, Olivia Dunham. Just brilliant."

"Am I the only one wondering what the hell just happened here?" Rose asked, her confusion at the situation giving way to irritability with the lack of the Doctor's answers.

"Nope. I'm wondering that too," said the dark, curly haired woman.

"Me three," said the Secretary, whom Rose was now beginning to notice must be an alternate version of the man. He definitely didn't _dress_ like the Secretary.

"We were at the nexus of a total reboot of time and space," the Doctor announced, his voice practically cracking in its excitement. "For the first time in eons, something has literally been taken entirely out the universe and space and all four of the dimensions to the point that not even _I_ remembered its original existence, and then this woman here brought it back into being by sheer will power. Seriously, this woman is brilliant. I'm actually in awe. That never happens."

"But, how? And why do you remember?"

"For a few moments there, I didn't. And that goes to show how amazing this feat is. Until we showed up over here, I had no idea that anything had been changed - that man now lying over there, whom I'm sure you all are _starting_ to remember - was entirely gone from reality. That's never been done before. He had no energy signature or anything - nothing to call across time and space and remind me of what had once been. But then this woman here found something in her mind - a gift I had left for her before she re-wrote time - and she used it to fix things."

Rose was starting to remember bits and pieces of what he was saying - thinking too strongly about it gave her a headache - but she remembered there was a dire situation. Something was falling apart, it needed to be fixed, and the blonde woman had to forget.

"But, won't us remembering him negate everything that just happened?" Rose asked. She was sure that she and the Doctor had discussed all this before, but her mind was fuzzy - details were blurring together and the stories were meshing, and she couldn't remember what had been and what wasn't, and what was supposed to be. It reminded her of how she had felt when she had awoken on the TARDIS with no memory of how she had somehow saved the Doctor from the year 200,100, only this time there was no singing in her head.

"Miss Dunham did a universal reboot. She wrote him out of existence just long enough for the universe to right itself - to rebuild to the walls which never should have been taken down in the first place. And then she did a system update - eliminated the 'bridge' from the equation and rewrote the universe to fit around the new individual she wanted. And then she did the impossible. Oh, how I love it when you humans do that…"

Rose couldn't help but smile as she saw the Doctor smile down on the blonde agent with unabashed pride and admiration in his eyes.

"We were at the nexus when she started doing her reboot so, even without our knowledge, the universe wanted to make sure that we were set to rights as well when she put her friend back in reality. The rest of the universe - no one outside this room - will have any memory of him not being there or of the six months with the bridge, or the war between universes. She's created a real-life deus ex machine for herself. She's a writer's dream, she is."

Rose almost sarcastically asked if he would like to get a private room with the agent before she checked herself. The woman was unconscious on her lap, and Rose actually did consider the woman a friend. Plus, she was worthy of admiration from the Doctor. Rose gently moved Olivia's head off her lap, and gave a small thanks to the curly haired woman as she - Astrid, some part of Olivia's tired mind supplied - knelt down and placed Olivia's head on her own lap in Rose's stead.

Rose stood up, giving a silent sigh of relief as blood rushed back into her numbed legs and walked over to the other side of the room where this universe's version of Dr Bishop was unabashedly checking up on the life stats of his son. His fingers were on the younger man's wrist, and Rose could see the man counting, measuring his son's pulse rate.

Rose studied the features of the younger man. She was starting to remember bits and pieces of what she had previously known about Peter Bishop, but in any case, this was the first time she had set eyes on the man. He was, to put it simply, the sort of man she would have hit on in her days pre-Doctor. To be honest, she probably would still have hit on him even while travelling with the Doctor. There was something of Captain Jack visible in his build, and she couldn't help but be attracted to that. Add in to that the fact that he was willing to sacrifice himself to the whims of time for the woman he loved, and Rose was a guaranteed fan.

What a group the two pairs of them made, she mused to herself. The women were willing to cross universes for the men, and the men were willing to re-write time for the women, even at the expense of writing themselves out of time. It was almost poetic that the two groups of them seemed fated to cross paths numerous times. People could advocate that it all came down to choice as much as they wanted to - the Doctor was one such loud-spoken advocate - but Rose couldn't help but feel that destiny worked into it somewhere. She didn't think that the two ideas were mutually exclusive.

Rose heard the man mutter the name "Olivia" in his unconscious state, and smiled softly to herself. She loved it when she got to see a happy ending.

A question suddenly occurred to Rose.

"You said you left her a gift earlier that she used to access her memories and bring him back. What gift? What memory?" Rose knew she was verging on being unforgivably nosey, but she didn't care. She was, at heart, very much a romantic. And as both parties involved were now unconscious she could hardly ask them. She also noted with undisguised amusement that both Astrid and Dr Bishop looked keen on hearing the Doctor's answer too.

"I didn't give her a memory. It couldn't be a memory - Peter Bishop had to not exist AT ALL for the reboot to work. I couldn't use anything that would manipulate that, so I ran an experiment, as I told you I would, Rose. I simply gave her a phrase that meant something to her - planted it in her head, so to speak - to think of at the appropriate time. It was a chance at least that she would remember, but that was the most I could give her."

"A chance? You staked everything on a whim?" asked Astrid, in a tone that Rose couldn't really decipher. It was either angry or awed. Rose came to the conclusion that it was probably an even mixture of both…possibly 60/40.

"Do I ever do anything else?" the Doctor asked innocently, as though the young lab assistant would have any idea as to his antics one way or the other. Rose figured that, in comparison with Walter, the Doctor and the mad scientist probably stacked up pretty evenly in the young lab assistant's estimation.

"What was the phrase?" Dr Bishop asked, lowering his eyes back to his son as he continued to soothingly stroke the younger man's hair.

"Just something that I had found in Olivia's head when I tried to wake her up. She didn't even know what it meant, but it was all over the place in her head: Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toi."

* * *

><p><strong>AN**: Sorry for any mistakes that may be in this. I haven't had much time to do anything but give it a basic read through for proof-reading mistakes. A hurricane is supposed to hit us head on sometime this evening and I wanted to make sure I got this up. If I don't respond to any comments, I'm not ignoring you; I'm without power. This was the penultimate chapter. The next one ties up all the loose ends. Thanks so much to all my readers for sticking through this real mind-screw. I'm not sure even I understand half the rambling I've given out on this thing, lol. I hope you enjoyed.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N**: Here it is, everyone. The final chapter. Thanks so much to everyone who has favourited or added this story to their story alerts list over the last few months. I hope you've enjoyed reading it. Special thanks to _onlimain_ for the continued encouragement and in-depth reviews. I've enjoyed our little conversations over PM, and this final chapter is dedicated to you for all the wonderful questions you've asked. You're the greatest.

If you enjoy what you've read, feel free to check out my other works on my author profile and leave me your thoughts. I hope everyone enjoys the s04 premiere of Fringe this week, and the s06 finale of DW that's coming up. On with the show!

**Disclaimer:** See previous chapters. I own only the typos.

**CHAPTER 5**

Olivia was exhausted. How was it possible that everything that had happened had occurred in only three hours? It felt so much longer than that to her aching muscles and pounding skull. Then again, she reasoned to herself, she had technically just lived four lifetimes in less than twenty minutes, so it was no great wonder she was weary of it all. There was the original time line, the six months/lifetime with Peter as energy, the one minute/lifetime of Peter not existing at all, and then the new time line with a Peter filled existence, minus the drama of universal war. Olivia herself wasn't quite sure how it was possible for him to be there and all those events not be plaguing her, but she was now passed the point of questioning a good thing. She had done the impossible, to quote the Doctor, and she would have to be content with those words as an explanation. She wasn't sure her brain could take much more explanation anyway, so she let it pass. She was positive that Peter could explain it all to her later, when they were both rested and had a combined IQ of something larger than a cucumber.

Peter was currently sitting at one of the lab tables, a wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders, talking quietly and intensely with Walter. In the thirty minutes since he had reappeared in the former bridge room - Olivia supposed that now she would only need to refer to it as a lab - she had gained no chance to speak with him. First, Walter had insisted on checking all of his vitals and now seemed to be questioning his son's mental state. Olivia tried not to feel impatient or petulant. After all, she had been talking with Peter for an hour (though it seemed much shorter when she was unconscious), and Walter hadn't spoken to his son in six months/an entire two different lifetimes. He deserved his opportunity to catch up. But still, Olivia wished he would hurry. A part of her wanted to speak to him so badly that she felt she may have to be rude and push Walter out of the way, or at least intrude in the conversation. The last thing she had told him before he stepped on the Machine was that she loved him, and she wanted to find out if they could continue that conversation. She at least wanted to touch him and get the physical confirmation that she wasn't just dreaming. Peter glanced her direction, obviously only half listening to his father's rambling, and spared her a small smile that immediately put Olivia a bit more at ease. Olivia sighed softly. He would come speak to her when he could, and her staring at him wasn't going to make that wait any less of a time.

Olivia startled a bit when she felt a hand grab her shoulder, and turned to see Rose standing beside her, offering her a bottle of water. Olivia smiled in thanks as she grabbed it from Rose's hand, and she then scooted over where she was sitting on a lab table, making room for the younger blonde haired woman.

Rose lifted herself up, swinging her legs off the edge like a child in primary school and gripping the edge of the table with her hands, flicking her fingers against the underside in a soothing rhythm. "So, you look like you're thinking deep thoughts," Rose said, cocking her head in Olivia's direction and raising her eyebrows, her tongue sticking out between her teeth in a coquettish manner.

"Any thoughts at all seem like one thought too many right now," Olivia answered. "I just…I feel like any answers I get would only confuse me more, but I also feel like if I don't have any answers that it's not really real. I mean, I've been four people in less than two hours. I have four lifetimes in my head, and I know which one the current time line says is the truth, but what makes it any more real or true than the three other time lines I remember?"

"Well, the good looking, blue eyed bloke across the room who has been trying as hard as he can to not stare at you since he was brought into being thirty minutes ago is pretty real, I have to say. If he's not, you've got one hot imagination, and I wouldn't be adverse to you loaning it to me for awhile," Rose replied, laughing slightly. Olivia felt herself smile in response.

"Wouldn't your Doctor have a problem with that, don't you think?"

"It's not like he hasn't had his share of being snogged by other women! Seriously, it's like a step back to the 1950s sometimes with that alien. Another guy even *looks* at me, and he goes all broody, dark eyes and starts talking like, 'I am the Oncoming Storm and the Bringer of Darkness,' and they all would run off. But the second he sees a well-educated blonde, he runs away after her. Granted, he's half-human now, so he's improved a bit, especially since now he knows that he can't hop in his TARDIS to another galaxy when my mum threatens to slap him. But, I'm a woman with eyes and I am more than allowed to look and fantasize. What the Doctor doesn't know won't hurt him.

"Plus, it hardly matters anyway. I don't think that bloke of yours notices there's another woman in the room."

Olivia continued to smile as she listened to Rose chatter. Aside from Astrid and Rachel (and GOD was Olivia glad for the new memories she had that included a Rachel that could walk and talk, and for the wonderful niece she was blessed with), Olivia had no real female friends. She guessed, however, that Rose definitely now qualified. She only showed up when the world was ending, but wasn't that what a friend *should* do?

Without really meaning to, Olivia found herself wondering what the Rose of her world would be like, and how had Rose implanted herself into an alternate world so easily? Olivia couldn't really fathom it. How does one avoid their alternate self, especially if one has the same name?

"Rose, when you first arrived in what you and the Doctor call Pete's World, how did you avoid your alternate self? I mean, I couldn't avoid meeting mine and the situation turned out to be less than ideal."

"Oh. Well, I don't have an alternate. My parents never had children in that world - that world's version of Jackie didn't want to ruin her figure. The only Rose Tyler in that world was a little dog. Made me telling Pete Tyler who I really was into something of an awkward conversation, I can tell you. I mean, he didn't throw me into solitary confinement or anything, but his response to the news was more than a little frosty."

"What about the Rose Tyler from my world? Do you want to look into her? We have plenty of time now, I think."

Rose was silent a moment, and as Olivia looked into Rose's honey brown eyes, she noticed that something about Rose seemed so much older than her twenty-something years. Olivia could not help but feel that some of her own hard-earned wisdom and life lessons were ones Rose had also been forced to learn the hard way as well. Olivia had four lifetimes in her eyes; she wondered how many she could count in Rose Tyler's, if the younger woman would let her.

"It's tempting, but I'll pass. That Rose Tyler isn't me anymore than the Pete's World version of Olivia Dunham is you."

"Yeah. Not that anyone on my team noticed that," Olivia said, the words slipping out to her friend in a bitter fashion before she had a chance to check them. Rose sat silently beside her, the only sign that she was waiting for a continuation being that her fingers had stopped their rhythmic tapping on the underside of the lab table. Olivia took a deep breath before she continued. This woman had saved her life - helped her escape back home - and had given her some advice. If anyone deserved to know what the outcome and trials of that advice had been, it was Rose.

"I tried to follow what you had suggested to me before I left Pete's World. I got home, Peter picked me up and made sure I rested and, despite my protesting, took me to the hospital to get checked out. And I knew from what he told me that my alternate had been undercover on my team for almost six weeks before they discovered she was a plant. And I thought I would be able to handle whatever he had to tell me - like you said, he had earned all my efforts I'd gone through to save him, and therefore, he was obviously worth forgiving. But when he told me everything that had happened with…her, I just couldn't. Every time I tried to forgive him, I just felt sick, and I wondered why I always have to be the understanding one, and then I'd just get angry at him. I guess, in the end, I forgot your advice because giving forgiveness turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.

"In the end though, underneath all the anger and fear and resentment, I only had one real source of anger. And I felt it for everyone, but I directed it at him because, well, his ignorance had hurt the most - but I was angry that none of them noticed. Not a single one. She may not be me, as you say, but she may as well have been."

Olivia stared down at her lap as she finished speaking, distracting herself from her thoughts by studying the ripples in the water residing in her bottle. When she noticed that Rose was still not speaking after some minutes of silence, she turned to see what had distracted her young friend. Rose, it seemed was not distracted by anything at all, but was merely staring at Olivia as though deciding whether or not she had the right to ask what was currently fluttering through her mind.

"What is it?" Olivia asked, wondering what possible retort Rose could think of in response to her earlier statements.

"But you did forgive him eventually, right?"

Olivia balked at the question. She thought it was fairly evident that she had; she certainly wouldn't have given herself a nosebleed and the world's worst migraine (she was pretty certain she came close to having an aneurysm) to bring into existence someone she was loathing or felt wronged by. Then she remembered the bitter tone of her previous comments - Olivia guessed that despite forgiving Peter and the others, a part of her would always be a bit resentful - and realised that she couldn't fault Rose for asking. She certainly hadn't given Rose any clues to insinuate that Peter had redeemed himself.

"Of course. Wholeheartedly."

"Good. Because I really don't think you can afford to pass any judgments on that score," Rose said, hopping down off the table and turning hard at the waist, as though working out some kinks from her back.

"What do you mean?" Olivia asked, not sure whether or not Rose's comment was meant to sound as insulting and suggestive as it had been received.

Rose placed a hand on Olivia's knee and gave it a friendly squeeze - a show of affection that Olivia was fairly certain had been rubbed off on Rose from the Doctor - and told Olivia firmly, though not unkindly, "Just think about it, okay? Whatever pain you felt a year ago - the betrayal, the loneliness, the resentment - I'm sure your friend has now felt that as well. The reasoning behind it may be different, but the pain is the same, and as with all other things in a relationship, pain and forgiveness are two way streets."

With one last friendly squeeze and a small smile, Rose walked away. Olivia could do nothing more than stare bemusedly after her as she watched Rose go speak with Walter and Astrid, and tried to work out what she meant. It took her about thirty seconds longer than normal to realise that Walter was speaking with Rose, which meant that Peter would be free. However, when she glanced over to him, it was to see Peter deep in conversation with the Doctor. _Damn_, she thought. It appeared she would have to wait a few seconds longer.

* * *

><p>The Doctor, meanwhile, was trying to have a conversation with the somewhat uncooperative Peter Bishop. The younger man's attention seemed to be placed almost entirely on the blonde woman (well, the blonde that wasn't Rose anyway). Not that the Doctor could blame the man - the Doctor's own attention was usually slightly spastic at best, and if the Doctor had been away from Rose for six months…well, he'd have something of a one track mind too. Hell, the Doctor had even overlooked a Dalek in the background when he had seen Rose standing on that street in Chiswick after two years of separation. It was the last thing he remembered from before he sprung out of a spare hand in the middle of an inferno in the TARDIS console room.<p>

Still, there were important things to discuss, and that couldn't happen until the younger Bishop at least realised the Doctor was speaking. The Doctor snapped his fingers and the young man, far from being impressed, merely glowered at him in an annoyed fashion.

"So, you're feeling okay? No headaches or dizziness or random urges to join a circus?"

"Yes, no, no, and I'm already in a circus."

The Doctor leaned forward over the opposite end of the table, resting his elbows on its top and placing his chin on the palm of one hand. He watched as Peter copied his pose somewhat, only instead of resting his chin on his hand, he rubbed at his eyes tiredly. The Doctor fought against the urge to do the same - it had indeed been quite a long day. It had, in fact, been three different days today.

"So, no side effects at all? No mixing memories or gaps or anything like that?"

Peter looked around them quickly, checking the distance between where they were and the position of Rose and Astrid and then the distance between them and Olivia. He gestured for the Doctor to lean forward and lowered his voice as he spoke.

"I still remember everything - the previous universe, the six months of seeing and not hearing, of yelling my throat raw. Naturally, I don't remember not existing, but I remember everything else. Will I always have those memories?"

"Yes, but don't worry. Eventually, the others will turn into what most memories are - hazy and fuzzy on the details. I mean, to reference them, you'll insert your own assumptions in there and you'll create little titbits that you'll swear are true but didn't *really* happen, just like you do with all your childhood memories."

"So am I two people or just one? Am I the Peter with all the real memories that no longer actually happened or am I the Peter with all the fake memories that *did* happen?" Peter asked quietly, staring at his hands. The Doctor wasn't positive as to whether the young man was being rhetorical and philosophical or if he expected an answer.

The Doctor answered, in any case. "You are who you choose to be. Just as you've always been."

Peter gave a weak chuckle and a small smile, nodding his head slightly. "There is one more thing," the young man added, quieter still this time from the previous set of questions. "The future I saw…everything that happened. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge? Do I change it?"

The Doctor studied the man before him. Peter's blue eyes were penetrating the Doctor's brown ones with a fiery strength that somewhat resembled the look the Doctor had often seen in Olivia Dunham's green ones. The Doctor knew the answer he gave was a perilous one - could make or break the future of not only the reality he was currently in, but of the one he was about to return to in what would hopefully be only a few more minutes.

There are few things that could convince a genius of a man to climb into a universe-destroying machine. There are even fewer things that could convince a man well versed in quantum mechanics to want to screw around with the laws of time and space. Those things tended to come down to: completely destroying one's own race in a Time War (the Doctor had fought the temptation to go back in time and save his own people and he had won, but it had been a near defeat on his part), trying to impress East End shop girls and give them their hearts desire, perform cheap tricks to make an intelligent med student smile…and to keep a loved one from being put in a situation that would end in them being killed.

"You already have, didn't you?" the Doctor queried back. "The war doesn't happen now. No one has had to cross over. Walternate doesn't care about this universe - to be honest, who knows what Rose and I will discover when we cross back over? It'll be quite an adventure to get to know that universe all over again. Certainly a lot more peaceful I'm sure."

"Then how am I here?" Peter asked. The Doctor gave into temptation and rubbed his own eyes with his right hand, resting the edges of his fingers on the bridge of his nose - a physical cue that he had no real words to explain an idea he had, but that he was about to try to explain so that he could at least *sound* intelligent. There was nothing the Doctor hated more than to say nothing at all.

"You exist because your blonde friend on the other side of the room wanted you to do. You were quite lucky, you know. You had managed over the years of your friendship, to embed something so deeply within her psyche that even time and universal re-writes couldn't get rid of it. You gave her a moral compass to follow."

"What moral compass?" Peter asked, his tone implying that he had a good idea what the Doctor may be referring to, but was seeking confirmation.

"The Greek phrase in her head. 'Be a better man than your father.' That came from you, didn't it?"

"Yeah. My mother used to say it to me every night before bed. It was one of the few things about my childhood I shared with her before…everything. It became like a code between us."

"Ah yes. I know a lot about those. Sadly, the only foreign language Rose and I got to hear ours in was Welsh. Disappointing, that. And we didn't even know it was our code phrase yet at the time."

Peter raised his eyebrows in question, obviously curious to hear the story behind the Doctor's digression, but the Doctor merely flicked the question away with his hand. There were more important things to discuss than stories from what was, quite literally, a lifetime and a half ago.

"Anyway, that phrase between you and Agent Dunham has a lot of power. It's something pure, untarnished. It was something that, even with not remembering you, she could live up to because it follows her own personal disposition. That need to look after people and care for them. BUT it also describes you, at least in her own mind I'm assuming. So, all it took to bring you back was something to lead her to a thought or a small inclination toward that one familiar phrase, and ZAP!" The Doctor took the opportunity to thump his hand down hard on the table, causing everyone else in the room to stare at he and Peter. The Doctor shook his hand out slightly afterward, his hand numb with the force. "One tiny little sliver of thought and everything about you came shuffling back."

"But I still don't get how it's possible."

"If there's one thing I've noted about the human race in my 900+ years of time and space travel, it's that the one thing humans have the most trouble with is letting go. Memories are tricky things. Just when you think you've let someone go or that a feeling for someone is gone, they pop right back up again. Sometimes, that's bad. It means that humans forgive, but they don't forget; it means that bad habits are nearly impossible to break; it means that they return to relationships best left behind them. Other times, their fortitude and devotion does the impossible - it keeps the dead alive in people's hearts, it keeps people fighting in a hopeless situation, and it means that a person can hang on subconsciously to something that they're not even aware they've lost in the first place. And if there's one person who's good at clinging on to what little hope there is with both hands, it's your Agent Dunham."

The Doctor gave him a small smile when he finished, standing up from his position at the table. The rest would be left up to Agent Dunham to explain to the man, for it was her heart and her mind that had decided the situation. And he had his own universe to get back to and his own firecracker of a blonde with which to argue and tease.

"I'll just…leave you two to it," the Doctor said, somewhat awkwardly as he saw that the younger man had already left the table to begin walking to the other side of the room where Agent Dunham was eagerly standing up to receive him.

* * *

><p>Olivia stood awkwardly before Peter, wringing her hands together nervously and berating herself internally for being ridiculous. This wasn't their first conversation or their first reunion. Hell, it wasn't their first anything - they'd passed all of those months ago - and yet, she felt as though she had asked him out and was anxiously awaiting his reply. It was juvenile and totally the wrong feeling for the situation they were in, but it was how she felt. In one reality, she had told him she loved him and though he hadn't said the words in response, she had known he felt the same. (Words had never really been necessary between them anyway). But this was a new reality, and they were different people now, and she didn't know which version of Olivia he expected her to be. (She actually was pretty certain that within a few hours she was going to be hit with an identity crisis or end up hospitalised with some form of multiple personality disorder. One way or another, she wasn't leaving this crisis without being in need of some sort of therapy).<p>

"Hi," he said, putting his hands into his jean pockets and rocking back slightly as though unsure of what to do with himself.

"Hey," she answered back. She stood stone still for a second before throwing caution to the wind and throwing her arms around his neck to hug him. She wasn't sure which version of herself it was that wanted the contact - version 1 that was in love with him, version 2 that was lonely, version 3 that was even more lonely, or version 4 that was either in love with him or just really friendly (she didn't know herself well enough yet) - but she indulged the whim. Peter didn't seem to mind all that much as he quickly returned it and squeezed her hard enough around her midsection that she suspected she might be sporting bruised ribs later.

"Thank you," he whispered against her neck.

She released him and leaned back to look up at him with a smile. "I'm pretty sure you and the universe are worth it." Without meaning to, one of her hands reached out and tangled its fingers with his. It felt familiar, comfortable, and right. Olivia relished it. Version 1 had always loved holding his hand (and doing lots of other things too, if she let herself think about it). Version 2 had always liked to study people's hands, but rarely held anyone's hand. Version 3 had hated to be touched at all. Version 4 seemed to enjoy it as much as Version 1, and was more than happy to go along with the development. There was something in her that felt complete when his hand encased hers and it made her feel like she went on and on forever - their hands feeling almost like a circle - and she wondered if this is why everyone always seemed to see holding hands as a mark of intimacy.

"I still don't know how you brought me back. I mean, I know you focused on my mother's phrase, but what did that do?" He used their encased hands to pull her closer to him, forcing her to throw her head further back to continue to see his face while she spoke. It also brought her body into slightly more contact with his own, and she definitely couldn't find it within herself to complain about that.

"That was easy. I did as you asked. I wished you gone, and for a few seconds there - maybe half a minute - you were. And the kind of person I was - lonely, unforgiving, hopeless, no patience at all for anyone, no humour - was someone that even I couldn't stand. To be honest, I'm pretty sure that version of me was clinically depressed and suicidal. And all I could think through this intense ringing in my ears was, 'There's got to be more to life than this.' Then I remembered the phrase, and I found myself struggling to remember how I knew it and why it meant so much to me to be a better person than the people who had gone before me. I had to remember why I was supposed to care about people. And even though I had no idea of you - no memories or ideas - all I knew was that people *like* you had to exist somewhere. A good, intelligent man with a strong personality, and I found myself wishing for that. I guess a part of me was waiting for you just like you were…"

She stopped suddenly, her mind finally realising what Rose had been trying to tell her previously. Peter had been waiting for her. For the six months that she had blissfully been living a life without him in it, he had been trying to contact her - had yelled for her, done everything within his limited power to try and get her attention - and she hadn't noticed at all. Along with the crushing feeling of guilt came the feeling of empathy. She had been replaced and *he* hadn't noticed, and he had been taken out of her life completely and *she* hadn't noticed. She was pretty sure they were more than even when it came to feelings of betrayal. Rose was right; Olivia had no place to judge anymore, much less hold on to those negative feelings. In any case, if there was one thing Olivia had learned over the last few months and four distinct lifetimes, it was that time was a precious, unpredictable thing. And she needed take whatever little bit of it she had.

She shook her head to clear it, aware that she had left her thought hanging in mid-air. "Anyway, I guess the real story is that Version 3 of myself was constantly wishing for things she didn't have because aside from work she literally had nothing at all. And that wish brought me you…after I went under about 3 minutes of absolutely unbearable pain through every inch of my body, of course."

"Sorry," Peter answered awkwardly, apparently at a lost for anything else to say.

Olivia stared up into his eyes, relishing the fact that she could see and touch him and also remember him. It was more than she could have hoped for an hour previously, but she was beginning to suspect that the Doctor tried to make a habit of doing the impossible wherever he went, if only so that he could say that he done so.

She reached up a hand and ran it gently over his omnipresent two-day stubble before snaking her hand back behind his head to force his head down to her level. She smirked at him slightly and whispered, "Don't be" - a comment she knew he would recognise as his own from what felt like a lifetime before. And before he could chuckle or give a response she planted her own lips over his. It had been too damn long since she had done this, a portion of her mind told her (most likely the affection starved portion, if Olivia had to hazard a guess). She was dimly aware that there was an audience in the room, but she decided she would worry about that later. She hadn't kissed Peter in six months in one time line's reckoning, and she'd never kissed him at all in the other two, and the current version of herself seemed pretty content to just go along with the ride.

Peter seemed to agree with her. His lips were caressing her own with very little finesse, but what he lacked in grace he made up for in fervency. After all, she wasn't exactly focusing on her form either. The kiss was what one would expect from a couple who hadn't had any contact in too long a time. It wasn't so much exploratory as it was a claiming - a very firm pillaging of each other's mouths that was meant to be as dizzying and heady as it was relatively short. The exploratory, sweet kisses would come later, when it was just the two of them. For now, quick, needy, and thorough was what was needed.

It didn't break off until Olivia heard a distinct cough and throat clearing from near her right.

"Not to break up this lovely little reunion," announced the Doctor, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet in his plimsolls and keeping his eyes determinedly fixed on the ceiling, a blush coating his cheeks, "but I was wondering if you were planning on getting Rose and I home anytime soon?"

* * *

><p>Rose felt like clocking the Doctor upside his head. Couldn't he give Olivia and her bloke even five minutes to reunite? After all, the universe hadn't been nearly so kind to Rose and the Doctor when they had been reunited - Rose was sure such lovely reunions were quite rare - and she thought her friend deserved the opportunity to enjoy it a bit. Plus, if Rose wanted to be honest, she really enjoyed watching them. They had gone from awkward and cute to hot and steamy in seconds, and it was the closest thing Rose had seen to an epic reunion that wasn't on the telly. She supposed seeing her mum meet up with Pete came pretty damn close to epic, but it wasn't *quite* the same thing. This one had both hugging AND kissing, and she was certain there would have been declarations of love soon after too if the Doctor hadn't ruined it. And to think she had often accused *Mickey* of being a cock block.<p>

Rose curbed her impulse to clock the Doctor completely and settled for elbowing him in the back instead.

"Oi! What was that for?" the Doctor asked indignantly, rubbing the spot she had whacked as though she had hit him much harder than she had done in actuality. Rose didn't dignify his question with a response and merely rolled her eyes. For being the smartest being in the universe (or so he claimed), he really was the densest bloke she'd ever met, of any species.

Olivia and Peter came over to join Rose, the Doctor, Walter and Astrid where they were standing near the door to the room. Rose noted with slight girlie excitement that Olivia's fingers were still firmly interlaced with Peter's.

"I'm supposed to get you home? But I thought you said that the bridge was gone now?"

"Oh, it is!" the Doctor answered with flourish. "And great job on that, by the way. But, you can send Rose and I back to our world the same way you got back to this one last year. You still have the ability to open miniature rifts, and as long as nobody messes with it after we go through, it'll close itself up quickly enough. And if need be, I'll give it a little boost towards being a scab myself," he finished, pulling out his sonic screwdriver from the breast pocket of his jacket.

Rose watched in amusement as Walter's eyes lit up in excitement and he took a small step toward the Doctor. Peter reached out an arm and held Walter back.

"Walter," the son admonished, "that technology is way beyond the design of this century, and no, you don't have the patent on it. So don't even *try* to lie and say that you do."

"Is that a vibrancy modulating and transmogrification device?" asked Walter, leaning over Peter's outstretched arm in an effort to get as close to the screwdriver as possible.

"Couldn't have put it better myself," the Doctor said. "Though, to keep it simple and for time's sake, I just call it a sonic screwdriver."

"A sonic screwdriver?" Peter asked, scepticism evident in his voice. "How did you come up with that invention? Need to fix a few doors?"

"I was putting up cabinets actually."

"How…er…useful," retorted Peter sarcastically.

Rose fought back a laugh at the Doctor's embarrassed expression. The Doctor cleared his throat and tried to get them back on topic.

"Still, Rose and I need your help to get back."

"Okay," Olivia answered, taking a deep breath and standing up straight. "What do you need me to do?"

"I just need you to focus for us on what you remember about our world. Not the people - I don't want to accidentally drag you over with us - but the places, the sights, the smells. Those sorts of differences. Rose and I will focus on our physical connections over there, and before you know it we should be back in our rightful place. That should be interesting, what with the Statue of Liberty being used for completely different things over there now, I'm sure."

"That sounds simple enough," said Agent Dunham, dropping Peter's hand and stepping closer toward the Doctor and Rose. She reached out a hand to the Doctor, and the Doctor grasped it, giving it a firm shake. "Thank you," Olivia said, her voice showing the gravity of the sentiment. "Thank you for everything."

Olivia held out a hand to Rose for Rose to shake, but Rose knocked the hand out of the way and hugged her instead. As had happened the year before, Olivia held herself stiffly at first before loosening and hugging Rose back firmly. "And thanks to you, too," Rose heard Olivia say softly. "Not just for saving the universe and Peter, but for…y'know. All that other stuff. You were right."

"Yeah, well. I usually am, me. Try telling him that though," she said, nodding her head in the Doctor's direction and smiling in fondness. "You look after that lot, yeah?" Rose said, gesturing towards the rest of the Fringe Team standing behind Olivia. "Sounds like you lot get yourself into almost as much trouble as the Doctor and I do."

"We stay busy, yeah," Olivia responded, chuckling slightly because there was little else she could do. "And I will."

Rose nodded to the others in farewell, giving an extra little wink to Astrid for whom she felt a strange, special fondness. The young lab assistant turned active field agent had been an interesting person for Rose to chat with while Olivia had been in the tank, and she found that Astrid had a lot of potential, considering her knowledge of computers and the paranormal. If it wasn't for the problem of being in opposite universes, she may have even tried recruiting the younger woman to work at Torchwood. Ah well. C'est le vie.

Rose stepped back from the group to rejoin the Doctor. She felt the familiar feel of the Doctor's hand enveloping her own, his thumb brushing the back of her hand in a familiar stroke that still sent gooseflesh up her arm. She spared him a small smile before closing her eyes to focus.

She allowed the memories of those in Pete's World to come as quickly as they wanted to. She thought first of the Doctor himself - the feel of his hand over hers, the smell of him that was left on the pillow in the morning, the way he bounced like a five year old given too much sugar, the squeak that would appear in his voice when he was flustered, the way his tongue would explore her mouth when they kissed, his faith in her that sometimes left her breathless and overwhelmed and made her worry that one day she would fail him. She thought of her mum - that comforting hug that only mothers have, the way her mother would yell Rose's full name when she was pissed as hell at her (Rose hated to hear that dreaded "Marion" between Rose and Tyler), the most perfect tea in the universe that only her mum seemed to know how to make, that strong slap the Doctor was always terrified of. She thought of her little brother Tony - how his first word had been RoRo and how that had made her mum turn seven shades of red, how he followed the Doctor around and tried to fight "aliens" with his "sonic screwdriver" (they were really random house hold objects fought off with a wooden figurine the Doctor had whittled for him). She thought of Pete and his protectiveness of her. She thought of Jake and his Geordie accent and the way he always ran into extraterrestrial altercations with guns blazing (to the Doctor's great chagrin).

Rose felt a strange popping in her ears, like pressure being let loose, and saw a faint flash of blue behind her eyelids, and then found herself back in her own universe, the Doctor's hand slightly clammy in her own.

"Where did you come from?" came a familiar voice. Rose turned around to see Dr Bishop and Brandon standing around an elaborate machine that Rose couldn't figure out. It was evident that this version of Walter was not a Secretary of Defence, for he was wearing a lab coat with his name on it and lacked the austerity of the Walternate with which Rose was more accustomed. Even Brandon felt different - less skeevy and sadistic and more confused and, to be frank, adorable.

The Doctor quickly plastered on a smile and sauntered up to the two men with the feel of a man who knows exactly what he's doing. Rose pulled an equally at ease expression and followed his steps forward.

"Hi, I'm Doctor Smith, and this is my lovely assistant Rose, and we were sent down from the…CEO to see how this…project…is coming along." Rose felt it was far from his most convincing lie, but she kept on smiling anyway. What she wouldn't give for the Doctor to still have his psychic paper.

"We told Nina Sharp it wouldn't be anywhere near finished yet," Walter replied, his tone petulant and annoyed. "Tell her if she's that anxious to have it finished she can work on it herself!" With that, Walter threw down his tools (which looked to Rose like a very tiny wrench and what appeared to be duct tape - she wasn't about to ask, that was for sure) and started to mutter incoherently about "women who thought they were more intelligent than they really were" and "sleeping..to the top." Rose was pretty sure it was just masked sexism slipping through; it seemed to be a facet of every version of Walter she had met so far. Brandon looked a bit terrified of Walter's reaction.

"Look, sir," he said, sidling up the Doctor nervously and putting on what Rose was sure Brandon though was a winning smile, "please ignore Dr Bishop. He's been under a lot of stress recently, what with the constant modifications made to the plans and all. And he just really doesn't want to rush the work and have the trial testing potentially hurt someone. Trust me, he does realise the importance of this government contract. He's just…er…busy?" he offered, somewhat lamely.

The Doctor merely nodded, trying to look serious and important. "Right. Well, just make sure it's finished by the due date and that it works correctly. You know how Ms Sharp is about these things. We'll be keeping an eye on you," the Doctor added, wagging in his finger in the poor scientist's face and accidentally tapping him on the nose more than once. Or, at least, Rose assumed the tapping was accidental. One could never really tell with the Doctor.

The Doctor grabbed Rose by the arm and ushered her out of the door. The two of them rushed through the Statue of Liberty, which now seemed to belong to a Massive Dynamic that was run by Ms Nina Sharp (Rose wondered how that huge change had come about and was excited to research that when she got home), and neither of them chanced looking at each other until they were standing outside of the building. Security was now rather lax, and no one had really seemed to pay them much mind as long as they walked like they knew where they were going. Since this was the Doctor's normal modus operandi anyway, they were golden. Rose still breathed a sigh of relief when they exited the oppressive building.

"So, what was that thing?" she asked, hoping that it wasn't something like a new kind of Amber. She had had enough adventure for one week, and if the universe was trying to throw another one in her path already, she was ready to tell it to piss off. She was going home to England, taking a long bath, curling up next to the Doctor and going to sleep for a year.

"I'm not positive, but I think it was a sonic Hoover. Granted, it was missing a few key components, so I can't say for sure."

"They'd need a government contract for that?"

"Well, they will be used to clean up the government's messes," the Doctor joked.

"Oh that…that's…bad joke. Really? That's the best you can come up with?"

"Oi! It's been a long day, all right? Like to see you do better. So, what do you say, Rose Tyler? You up for a long zeppelin ride and then an even longer tea with your mum," the Doctor visibly shuddered and made a noise that sounded suspiciously like "ew" after that suggestion, "and then finally head home?"

Rose nodded and grabbed his hand once again, taking comfort in the familiar warmth of it. She placed a light kiss where his arm turned into his shoulder before placing her head there, resting it against him as she matched his long strides as they walked towards the ferry that would lead them back to the main land. She rejoiced at the thought of returning to England and seeing her mum. But she didn't really feel like she was going home - home for her was wherever the Doctor was, and he was always with her. But, she didn't tell him that; she was certain he already knew. He always had.


End file.
